Ericsson and Pool—Peak

Ericsson and Pool
Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
(2016)

[12] We start off with a general idea of what we want to do, get some instruction from a teacher or a coach or a book or a website, practice until we reach an acceptable level and then let it become automatic. ...

[but] once you have reached this satisfactory skill level and automated your performance...you have stopped improving. People often misunderstand this because they assume that the continued driving or tennis playing or pie bak-

[13]

ing is a form of practice and that if they keep doing it they are bound to get better at it, slowly perhaps, but better nonetheless. They assume that someone who has been driving for twenty years must be a better driver than someone who has been driving for five, that a doctor who has been practicing medicine for twenty years must be a better doctor than one who has been practicing for five...

But no. Research has shown that, generally speaking, once a person reaches that level of "acceptable" performance and automaticity, the additional years of "practice" don't lead to improvement. If anything, the doctor or the teacher or the driver who's been at it for twenty years is likely to be a bit worse than the one who's been doing it for only five, and the reason is that these automated abilities gradually deteriorate in the absence of deliberate attempts to improve.

[40] This is how the body's desire for homeostasis can be harnessed to drive changes: push it hard enough and for long enough, and it will respond by changing in ways that make that push easier to do. ... [And then,] It is comfortable again. The changes stop. So to keep the changes happening, you have to keep upping the ante...

This explains the importance of staying just outside your comfort zone: you need to continually push to keep the body's compensatory changes coming, but if you push too far outside your comfort zone, you risk injuring yourself and actually setting yourself back.

This, at least, is the way the body responds to physical activity. Scientists know much less about how the brain changes in response to mental challenges.

...

[41] Recent studies have shown that learning a new skill is much more effective at triggering structural changes in the brain than simply continuing to practice a skill that one has already learned. On the other hand, pushing too hard for too long can lead to burnout and ineffective learning. The brain, like the body, changes most quickly in that sweet spot where it is pushed outside—but not too far outside—its comfort zone.

...

[45] developing certain parts of the brain through prolonged training can come at a cost: in many cases

[46]

people who have developed one skill or ability to an extraordinary degree seem to have regressed in another area. Maguire's study of the London taxi drivers provides perhaps the best example. At the end of the four years, when the trainees had either finished the course and become licensed drivers or had stopped trying, she tested her subjects' memory in two ways. One involved knowing the locations of various London landmarks, and at this the subjects who had become licensed drivers did far better than the rest of the subjects. The second was a standard test of spatial memory...and on this the licensed drivers did much worse than the group who had never been trained to become taxi drivers. By contrast, the trainees who had dropped out scored about the same as the subjects who had never trained. Because all three groups scored equally well on this memory test at the start of the four-year period, the only explanation was that the licensed cabbies, by developing their memories of London streets, had done something to cause a decline in this other sort of memory. Although we don't know for sure what caused that, it seems likely that the intense training causes the trainees' brains to devote an increasingly large segment to this sort of memory, leaving less gray matter to devote to other sorts of memory."

[60] A key fact about such mental representations is that they are very "domain specific," that is, they apply only to the skill for which they were developed. We saw this with Steve Faloon: the mental representations he had devised to remember strings of digits did nothing to improve his memory for strings of letters. Similarly, a chess player's mental representations will give him or her no advantage over others in tests involving general visuospatial abilities, and a diver's mental representations will be useless for basketball.

This explains a crucial fact about expert performance in general: there is no such thing as developing a general skill. You don't train your memory; you train your memory for strings of digits or for collections of words or for people's faces. You don't train to become an athlete; you train to become a gymnast or a sprinter or a marathoner or a swimmer or a basketball player.

The impossibility of "general skills" would seem to torpedo my former youthful ideal of "style-neutral pedagogy." It is likewise a challenge to washed-up jocks who rail against today's regime of early specialization and insist that playing many sports growing up was important in making them successful at the one sport they ended up playing professionally.

Taleb administers the truth serum:

The entire notion of biography is grounded in the arbitrary ascription of a causal relation between specified traits and subsequent events.

And again:

The graveyard of failed persons will be full of people who shared the following traits: courage, risk taking, optimism, etc. Just like the population of millionaires.

(Black Swan, p. 105)

Perhaps the sports "graveyard" is also full of multi-sport athletes. And, per Ericsson, perhaps these jock-commentators are underselling their later intensive training in a specialty. This all may be closer to the truth. Unfortunately, none of it really makes the current social and cultural regime of hyperspecialization any easier to justify. I'll come clean and invite the jocks to cosign: perhaps the recourse to a "general skills" hypothesis is merely a rationalization rather than a critique. It is a reaction against so much that is obviously wrong, but it itself is also wrong. If so, then we can safely dispense with it.

Having issued that mea culpa, I confess that I usually am unconvinced by these high-level, popularized accounts. It seems they always leave room for more granular skepticism. Start here: ear-training, e.g., is a general skill in music and a specialized skill in the grand scheme. The way ear-training was taught even in so specialized and airless an undergrad program as the one I attended was, as few of us failed to notice, a far cry from any of the settings to which we were expected to ultimately apply it. At a certain point, you must take your (specialized) place and see how it goes.

Incidentally, this is why the assertion that

If anything, the doctor or the teacher or the driver who's been at it for twenty years is likely to be a bit worse than the one who's been doing it for only five

also rings a bit hollow. There is no training that that is "specialized" enough to merge theory with practice; and at that point, the acclimation to practice is, functionally if not spiritually, a type of skills improvement.

Where I have worked for the past several years, this is indeed the outlook, and it seems to me something more than a mere rationalization. One of our finest players claims to have developed on-the-job rather than in the practice room, and unlike the jocks, in his case let's just say that life history, verbal statements, and observable behavior alike make this is a very believable story. What could account for this?

I remember where and when I was told for the first and only time by a representative of the college I had enrolled in that ensemble rehearsal time was not to be counted as "practice" time. Oddly enough, this rang truer for me in the school environment than it has in the "professional" one. I didn't get much of any benefit from rehearsing difficult music a few times and then giving one performance of it; but playing the same simple music thousands of times with the same players in the same setting has been the only thing that has pushed me past my post-college stagnation phase. The reasons for this actually comport perfectly with Ericsson's account. The missing factors are also the same ones missing from much of this book: quality is often subjective; no skill is ever perfected; motivation comes and goes.

Even for my bandmate, whose entire personal investment is elsewhere, the "want" to sound good is not the same kind of "want" as wanting a large family or a hamburger. He often seems not to care how he sounds, whereas I am more immediately buoyed by sounding good and crushed by sounding bad. Nonetheless, we both notice acutely; often we notice different things, but with the same (unusual) acuity. I am by far the more anxious to improve, but he has been at it four times as long as I have and he notices everything. Thus he has gotten really, really good, so good that even in his utterly apathetic pre-tired state his "expert performance" is "noticed" by all.

Given such a contradiction between consciously-stated attitudes and observable behavior, it makes sense to consider the environment. For one thing, playing the same simple songs in the same venue for years makes you hyperaware of your own (and others'!) shortcomings. Because the baseline task is simple enough and because it is repeated thousands of times, perhaps you begin to make small fixes without thinking too hard about it. In our case, we also have the privilege of hearing each other play, day after day, for years (in his case for decades). You would have to be exceptionally jaded not to crib a few things here and there; and again, with simple material you aren't precluded from doing so by your own shortcomings. In Ericsson's terms, we have never actually "automated our performance," even though this "automated" quality is axiomatic of the job we do. (As one of our seasonal compadres says, we "make music by the pound.")

Musical performance can be monotonous when unvaried. There's no doubt about that. But musicians aren't the "automating" type. Even musicians who seemingly fell into the profession rather than chasing after it, whose entire personal investment is elsewhere, even these musicians, I am left to conclude, are not the "automating" type. Of course I hear the same stories you do about tenured symphony players and academics who can barely play by the time they retire; and I hear stories about twenty year-olds winning significant auditions; but with my own eyes and ears mostly I find that older players have physically declined only slightly while they have learned and consolodated tremendously.

In these respects, the central place of music in so many popularized accounts of expert performance is actually quite inapt and unfortunate. Music seems to me an exceptionally poor (because confounded) lens through which to seek laboratory results. That could be because music itself is an "art" rather than a "science," but I fear it's actually because I know so much more about music than I do about, say, athletics or medicine.

(I also know that E&P's account of Scrabble player Nigel Richards is not quite right. Nigel's word knowledge is what first strikes a newb, but what fellow players really marvel at is his analytic ability, an ability which is so deep and unique that other grandmasters occasionally have trouble explaining or even discerning his thought-process in a given position. I know a lot of words and I'm just a potzer-expert. It's not hard to explain where the words come from. Nigel's purported photographic memory certainly is remarkable in its own right, but by itself it wouldn't get him very far. The reasons why are very hard to explain to a living-room Scrabble player, just like my sixty-something bandmate is hard to explain to a laboratory researcher. Anyway, to reiterate, it's suspicious how much more correct the book seems when it is discussing something I don't know anything about.)

In my particular college situation, we were assumed to be specialists without necessarily having had the chance to figure out what we really wanted. Time taken to find oneself is necessary for long-term adjustment, health, and for intrinsic fulfillment, but it works against professional success and social status, which are hypersensitive to anti-meritocratic warps like accumulative advantage and Kahnemanian distortions of judgment. Patience sets us back professionally once we are being compared with specialists who have already banked thousands of specialist-hours. Patience is a virtue only in the retrospective abstract, or maybe in Extremistan; functionally it is downright maladaptive for today's young people. It has been said (I know not with what justification) that even pro sports, the last preserve of innate ability and advantage, have begun to favor those with the most early specialist training. The era of the streetballer is over. You used to get better training playing streetball; as a mere child you played against grown-ups as soon as you had the courage to get out there with them; you either got assaulted or did the assaulting. But now the cultivated training programs have caught up with and surpassed the streetball method. The sudden inability of athletically superior American basketball players to consistently beat more highly-trained European players is attributable to this. So my sources tell me.

This individual dilemma is mirrored at mass scale. If there are no general skills, then decisions about what to teach to whom promise to defy conclusive democratic resolution. Best of luck to everybody!

Ericsson insists that no one is born a peak performer. Is it more plausible that as a matter of affinity there are born specialists and generalists? (By "born" let's include early influences/happenstances which are out of baby's control.) What he says later about "deliberate practice" not being fun for the practicer is hard for me to accept at face value. Ditto the dreaded invocation of "sacrifice" (255). For me the period of conservatory regimen was indeed not much fun, much as the subjects in his study reported, but it was not pure torture either. I wonder if "delayed gratification," that old warhorse, does not sum it up better, by which I mean that there is plenty of expectation of a later payoff. No, this is not "fun," but it is a mindset that keeps people going. I would caucus with the behavioral economists on this one and argue that something has to be keeping people going. Rank and Becker had a somewhat different "existential" gloss on this, but with the same bottom line. In the highly reductive, popularized account offered in Peak, meanwhile, there does not seem to be much of anything of this kind. Perhaps it is too obvious a point for him to have begun with to say that people must actually like the thing they are practicing if they are to improve at it. I think that by omitting it he has, rather, shown that it cannot be omitted. You can be having all the "fun" in the world yet without some such larger purpose be nonetheless on the edge of despair. Current events have driven that point home for good.

Perhaps the rare born specialists among us are bound to win the meritocracy, and perhaps at a population scale of billions the law of large numbers ensures there will enough of them to pretty much rule the world. And perhaps that's why the highest status performers in sports and music are only rarely the most entertaining.

And of course, consider Sennett (The Culture of the New Capitalism):

Practically, in the modern economy, the shelf-life of many skills is short; in technology and the sciences, as in advanced forms of manufacturing, workers now need to retrain on average every eight to twelve years. Talent is also a matter of culture. The emerging social order militates against the ideal of craftsmanship, that is, learning to do just one thing really well; such commitment can often prove economically destructive. In place of craftsmanship, modern culture advances an idea of meritocracy which celebrates potential ability rather than past achievement. ...

[Another] challenge follows from this. It concerns surrender; that is, how to let go of the past. The head of a dynamic company recently asserted that no one owns their place in her organization, that past service in particular earns no employee a guaranteed place. How
[5]
could one respond to that assertion positively? A peculiar trait of personality is needed to do so, one which discounts the experiences a human being has already had. This trait of personality resembles more the consumer ever avid for new things, discarding old if perfectly servicable goods, rather than the owner who jealously guards what he or she already possesses. ...

"Skills extinction" has sped up not only in technical work, but in medicine, law, and various crafts. One estimate for computer repairmen is that they have to relearn their skills three times in the course of their working lifetimes; the figure is about the same for doctors. That is, when you acquire a skill, you don't have a durable possession."
(pp. 4-5)



In those firms which do abandon the structures of social capitalism, the personal consequence of focusing on young talent is that as experience increases it has less value. I found in my interviewing that this slighting of experience was notably strong among consultants, who have a professional interest in thinking so.
(p. 97)



Skills extinction is a durable feature of technological advance.
(p. 98)

[112] The final problem with the ten-thousand-hour rule is that, although Gladwell himself didn't say this, many people have interpreted it as a promise that almost anyone can become an expert in a given field by putting in ten thousand hours of practice."

No, Gladwell did not "say" this explicitly, but you'd have to be a real bonehead not to pick up on this subtext. This was rather irresponsible of him, I think, (but good for the bottom line!) given the clear caveats which apply. Frankly, much of Peak is wrapped in similar subtextual optimism, all while being very careful not to "say" anything whose literal meaning is unsupportable.

To show a result like this, I would have needed to put a collection of randomly chosen people through ten thousand hours of deliberate practice on the violin and then see how they turned out. All that our study had shown was that among the students who had become good enough to be admitted to the Berlin music academy, the best students had put in, on average, significantly more hours of solitary practice than the better students, and the better and best music students had put in more solitary practice than the music-education students.

Indeed, take a quick mental inventory of all the obstacles (the practical ones, and also the logical/rhetorical ones) to conducting a study which "put[s] a collection of randomly chosen people through ten thousand hours of deliberate practice on the violin." Ericsson's subjects had already self-selected. That self-selection is a much more interesting and urgent topic for research, and probably it is not nearly as susceptible to any kind of study as is "expertise."

On the next page [113], Ericsson's measured optimism reappears:

When we say that it takes ten thousand—or however many—hours to become really good at something, we put the focus on the daunting nature of the task. ...

But I see the core message as something else altogether: In pretty much any area of human endeavor, people have a tremendous capacity to improve their performance, as long as they train in the right way. If you practice something for a few hundred hours, you will almost certainly see great improvement...but you have only scratched the surface. You can keep going and going and going, getting better and better and better. How much you improve is up to you.

This puts the ten-thousand hour rule in a completely different light: The reason that you must put in ten thousand or more hours of practice to become one of the world's best violinists or chess players or golfers is that the people you are being compared to or competing with have themselves put in ten thousand or more hours of practice. There is no point at which performance maxes out and additional practice does not lead to further improvement. So, yes, if you wish to become one of the best in the world in one of these highly competitive fields, you will need to put in thousands and thousands of hours of hard, focused work just to have a chance of equaling all of those others who have chosen to put in the same sort of work.

So, the rule of deliberate practice comes with no fixed prescription of quantity, but only one of quality. In competitive pursuits, the bar is set by one's competition; otherwise, it is up to us ourselves where we want to set the bar based on our own wants and needs.

Of course when we tie our goals to the external moving target of competition with others, we forfeit a certain amount of self-determination. Here again is an affinity that is not for everyone. I am not so sure that it leads ineluctably to social dysfunction, but certainly it is unsightly, it can be unpleasant to be around, etc. In this connection the "mediocore" perspective at least makes a little bit of sense to me. The problem is that even the quite modest, humane achievement of "a few hundred hours" of deliberate practice is plenty sufficient to form the basis of invidious comparison. It is certainly enough to alienate peers and to bring plenty of third-hand quotes from Marx streaming into your comments section.

[131] When you look at how people are trained in the professional and business worlds, you find a tendency to focus on knowledge at the expense of skills. The main reasons are tradition and convenience: it is much easier to present knowledge to a large group of people than it is to set up conditions under which individuals can develop skills through practice.

Indeed, and as band teachers and studio teachers know (or they should), simply conveying to the student the "knowledge" of how to set up such conditions for themselves, somewhere outside of school and outside the school day, and then sending them off to go make it happen, doesn't work at all, not when pretty much the entire social and material world outside of school is pushing in the opposite direction.

[154] Any activity at the limits of your ability will require full concentration and effort. ...

Maintaining this sort of focus is hard work, however, even for experts who have been doing it for years. ...the violin students I studied at the Berlin academy found their training so tiring that they would often take a midday nap between their morning and afternoon practice sessions. People who are just learning to focus on their practice won't be able to maintain it for several hours. Instead, they'll need to start out with much shorter sessions and gradually work up.

...Focus and concentration are crucial...so shorter training sessions with clearer goals are the best way to develop new skills faster. It is better to train at 100 percent effort for less time than at 70 percent effort for a longer period. Once you find you can no longer focus effectively, end the session. And make sure you get enough sleep so that you can train with maximum concentration.

...

[159] To effectively practice a skill without a teacher, it helps to keep in mind three Fs: Focus. Feedback. Fix it. Break the skill down into components that you can do repeatedly and analyze effectively, determine your weaknesses, and figure out ways to address them.

...

[164] Tests on the best typists have shown that their speeds are closely related to how far ahead they look at upcoming letters while they type.

...

[166] Some people had suggested that the students [spelling bee contestants] who had spent the most time practicing did so because they actually liked this sort of studying and got some sort of pleasure out of it. But the answers students gave to our questionaire told a very different story: they didn't like studying at all. None of them did, including the very best spellers. The hours they had spent studying thousands of words alone were not fun; they would have been quite happy to do something else. Instead, what distinguished the most successful spellers was their superior ability to remain committed to studying despite the boredom and the pull of other, more appealing activites."

Well, okay. Can we ask some adults sometime?

...

[167] there is little scientific evidence for the existence of a general "willpower" that can be applied in any situation. ...

[168] ...if anything, the available evidence indicates that willpower is a very situation-specific attribute.

For sure. But kids haven't chosen their situation. If you've broken loose of school and have your wits about you, then you can chase "situations" where you've already noticed you tend to have "willpower." Or you can "choose" to pound pills and watch porn; that's why the adults tried to lock you up for as long as it was legal to do so. It's a double-edged sword.

Once we establish that "willpower is a very situation-specific attribute," we then want to know the reasons for people's different choices of "situation." Now we are chasing a new set of psychological correlates, and then another, and another, until eventually we either run out of new places to look or end up back where we started.

...

[171] Runners and other athletes find that they become inured to the pain associated with their exercise. Interestingly, studies have found that while athletes get acclimated to the particular type of pain associated with their sport, they do not get acclimated to pain in general. They still feel other types of pain just as acutely as anyone else does. Similarly, over time musicians and anyone else who practices intensely get to the point where those hours of practice no longer seem as mentally painful as they once were. The practice never becomes outright fun, but eventually it gets closer to neutral, so it's not as hard to keep going.

[172] Studies of expert performers tell us that once you have practiced for a while and can see the results, the skill itself can become part of your motivation. You take pride in what you do, you get pleasure from your friends' compliments, and your sense of identity changes. You begin to see yourself as a public speaker or a piccolo player or a maker of origami figures. As long as you recognize this new identity as flowing from the many hours of practice that you devoted to developing your skill, further practice comes to feel more like an investment than an expense.

Another key motivational factor in deliberate practice is a belief that you can succeed. In order to push yourself when you really don't feel like it, you must believe that you can improve and—particularly for people shooting to become expert performers—that you can rank among the best. The power of such belief is so strong that it can even trump reality. [gives example of Swedish runner whose father lied to him about his time (on the low side) as a young teen, and who thereby gathered motivation]

...

[173] One of the strongest forms of extrinsic motivation is social motivation.

...

[174] One of the best ways to create and sustain social motivation is to surround yourself with people who will encourage and support and challenge you in your endeavors. Not only did the Berlin violin students spend most of their time with other music students, but they also tended to date music students or at least others who would appreciate their passion for music and understand their need to prioritze their practice.

Since when did other music students offer this kind of "understanding" to each other?! Let me know where I can find these people if they exist.

Perhaps the most important factor here...is the social environment itself. Deliberate practice can be a lonely pursuit, but if you have a group of friends who are in the same positions...you have a built-in support system.

...

[188] Bloom found a slightly different pattern in the early days of the children who would grow up to be mathematicians and neurologists than in the athletes, musicians, and artists. In this case the parents didn't introduce the children to the particular subject matter but rather to the appeal of intellectual pursuits in general.

[232] Of course, the abilities measured by IQ tests do seem to play a role

[233]

early on, and it seems that children with higher IQs will play chess more capably in the beginning. But what Bilalić and his colleagues found was that among the children who played in chess tournaments—that is, the chess players who were devoted enough to the game to take it a level beyond playing in their school chess club—there was a tendency for the ones with lower IQs to have engaged in more practice. We don't know why, but we can speculate: All of these elite players were committed to chess, and in the beginning the ones with higher IQs had a somewhat easier time developing their ability. The others, in an effort to keep up, practiced more, and having developed the habit of practicing more, they actually went on to become better players than the ones with higher IQs, who initially didn't feel the same pressure to keep up.

...

[236] If there are indeed genetic dif-

[237]

ferences that play a role in influencing how well someone performs (beyond the initial stages when someone is just learning a skill), they aren't likely to be something that affects the relevant skills directly—a "music gene" or a "chess gene" or a "math gene." No, I suspect that such genetic differences—if they exist—are most likely to manifest themselves through the necessary practice and efforts that go into developing a skill.

...

[255] Most people, even adults, have never attained a level of performance in any field that is sufficient to show them the true power of mental representations to plan, execute, and evaluate their performance in the way that expert performers do. And thus they never really understand what it takes to reach this level—not just the time it takes, but the high-quality practice. Once they do understand what is necessary to get there in one area, they understand, at least in principle, what it takes in other areas. That is why experts in one field can often appreciate those in other fields. A research physicist may better understand what it takes to become a skilled violinist, if only in general terms, and a ballerina may better understand the sacrifice it takes to become a skilled painter.

Our schools should give all students such an experience in some domain. Only then will they understand what is possible and also what it takes to make it happen.

...

[257] we could produce a new world, one in which most people understand deliberate practice and use it to enrich their lives and their children's.

What kind of world would that be? To begin with, it would contain far more experts in far more fields than we have today. The societal implications of this would be enormous. Imagine a world in which doctors, teachers, engineers, pilots, computer programmers, and many other professionals honed their skills in the same way that violinists, chess players, and ballerinas do now. Imagine a world in which 50 percent of the people in these professions learn to perform at the level that only the top 5 percent manage today. What would that mean for our health care, our educational system, our technology?

The personal benefits could be tremendous as well. I have spoken very little of this here, but expert performers get great satisfaction and pleasure from exercising their abilities, and they feel a tremendous sense of personal accomplishment from pushing themselves to develop new skills, particularly skills that are on the very edges of their fields. It is as if they are on a constantly stimulating journey where boredom is never a problem because there are always new challenges and opportunities."

Sure. But good luck creating the social support network for all of these people to become experts. You can spread the gospel of deliberate practice all you want, but "social motivation" is a zero-sum game.

p. 258--Homo exercens="practicing man"

pp. 258-259—he finally draws the connection to the fast-changing employment landscape and the seeming need for adult workers to retrain. Deliberate practice saves the world! But his outlook seems too rosy, because one-sided. Previously he has identified the importance of social motivation, but now the reader wonders just how that part of the equation could ever be applied at mass scale, how it could be normalized/institutionalized, as he seems here to think is possible, desirable, and necessary.

Most of this was written a while ago. It has been touched up in places, sometimes substantially. As so often, it languished in the backlog for so long that things have moved on. Let us see just how far they have moved on...

Brooke N. Macnamara and Megha Maitra
"The role of deliberate practice in expert performance: revisiting Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer (1993)"
(2019)

[2]

The impact of this article—which shifted the narrative about the origins of expertise away from any important role for genes or stable abilities and towards the importance of practice and training—is difficult to overstate. Cited over 9000 times (source: Google Scholar as of 12 November 2018), it is one of the most referenced articles in the psychological literature. ...

...

1.2.1. Magnitude of effects

...at least in retrospect, Ericsson et al.’s finding that accumulated amount of deliberate practice differentiated even experts is surprising. ...finding differences in amounts of practice between novices and experts would be expected, but finding significant differences among three groups of experts of varying accomplishment is less expected. ...Macnamara et al. found that accumulated amount of deliberate practice significantly accounted for performance variance among sub-elite athletes...and athletes with a range of skill levels, but did not reliably differentiate among elite athletes...

I've often had the (naive) thought that if innate differences were to emerge anywhere, it would be most clearly among experts who have all maxed out their deliberate practice ; this can redeem certain rat-races of "skill acquisition" which otherwise seem pointless and anti-meritocratic.

As we'll see later, it has been questioned whether Scrabble, e.g., actually entails "deliberate practice" by any of the competing definitions. No one can question that performance benefits from "preparation" here as elsewhere, but indeed, Scrabble can often seem more like the agglomeration of a few distinct rote exercises rather than a body of "expertise." This can be deflating. The surface "beauty" of the game masks a quite uninteresting, unremarkable, unaesthetic underlying structure.

The redeeming quality, though, is in being a game of "imperfect information," and also a "variance game" as a chess-playing co-worker once remarked to me in a slightly contemptuous tone of voice. But this is where the depth and beauty of Scrabble start, not where they end. I suspect that they end here, rather, if you have not done all of the rote learning needed to equip yourself for the task. (To be sure, I have not.) In that case, it's merely "your word against mine" as the old pun goes; it's just roulette. But reading your opponent's plays as signals is equal parts art and science, as are "stylistic" choices between candidate plays of near-equivalent equity. Rote learning is unsightly and, for most people, boring, but it is the key which unlocks all of this "next-level" game theory.

The magnitude of the effect of deliberate practice reported by Ericsson et al. is also surprising. ...

1.2.2. Potential bias

Ericsson et al.’s method for collecting retrospective estimates of practice—a structured interview—is potentially prone to experimenter bias and response bias . ...experimenters aware of the

[3]

hypothesis...can unconsciously influence participants’ estimates in an interview procedure. ... Experimenters in Ericsson et al. also provided participants with a ‘[d]escription of the institute and the purpose of the study’ just before the interview began . Depending on what was said, this could have influenced participants’ estimates. To reduce potential experimenter-expectancy bias and response bias, the present study employed a double-blind procedure—...

1.2.3. Multiple definitions

Ericsson et al. appear to theoretically define deliberate practice as practice activities designed by a teacher. ... However, according to both the study’s Methods section and the interview protocol...[they also] appear to operationally define deliberate practice as ‘practice alone’ with no indication that participants were asked to restrict their estimates of practice to only those designed by a teacher. ...

[4]

In the present study, we first asked participants to estimate amounts of deliberate practice defined as practice alone with no restrictions that the activities be teacher designed,... We next asked participants to estimate amounts of deliberate practice defined as teacher-designed practice, restricting estimates to time spent on practice activities that had been designed by a teacher.

If someone asked me this, I don't know that I could answer second part. My teachers didn't design my practice; I did. So my answer is: none. Although I was certainly applying my teachers' observations and remarks at all times. So, on second thought, my answer is: all.

[5]

2.1.4. Sample Size

... Conducting expertise research, by definition, means studying a small subset of the population, thus there are relatively few participants from which to sample, making large-sample replications nearly impossible. However, if replications of expertise studies never enter the scientific record because of small samples, then we probably will never provide additional evidence to support or refute the original studies. ...

... when the original study (with a small sample) has already entered the scientific record, replications with similar sample sizes (since that is all that is feasible) should also be allowed to enter the scientific record...

Further, the original publication made clear and bold claims,... ...while a similar finding from a small replication study would add minimal support, evidence contradicting an ‘impossibility’ needs only a single example to falsify it. In this way, replications of any size have the potential to contribute to our understanding...

[6]

2.2 Materials and Procedure

...

[7]

...

...enjoyableness of the activity without considering the outcome of the activity. We provided the same example as Ericsson et al. to describe this: ‘… it is possible to enjoy the result of having cleaned one’s house without enjoying the activity of cleaning.’

[15]

4. Discussion

...

[16]

...

We did not replicate Ericsson et al.’s major result of ‘complete correspondence between the skill level of the groups and their average accumulation of practice time alone with the violin.’ While the less accomplished violinists had accumulated less practice alone than the more accomplished groups, we found no statistically significant differences in accumulated practice alone to age 18 between the best and good violinists. In fact, the majority of the best violinists had accumulated less practice alone than the average amount of the good violinists. The results were similar when restricting practice estimates to only activities that were designed by a teacher.

Further, the size of the effect did not replicate. ... explaining 26% of performance variance is not an inconsequential amount. However, this amount does not support the claim that performance levels can ‘largely be accounted for by differential amounts of past and current levels of practice’...

...

One possibility for the different findings could be differing levels of expertise. While...our violinists appeared to have the same relative difference in skill from each other, they may have an overall higher level of expertise than Ericsson et al.’s violinists (e.g. the current violinists had entered many more competitions than those in 1993). If this is the case, it could be that the importance of deliberate practice diminishes at high levels of expertise in music, as has been demonstrated in sports.

i.e. Practice smarter, not harder?

Expertise above clearly means something different than it does in the subtitle to Peak. They seem to mean something like "savvy." As a brass player, I might say "guile."

[17]

...

4.1. Multiple definitions of deliberate practice

To the best of our knowledge, the present study was the first to test and compare both definitions of deliberate practice—practice alone and teacher-designed practice. ...

...Ericsson has sometimes argued that practice activities need to be designed by a teacher to qualify as deliberate practice. In the context of arguing against the results of a meta-analysis that found deliberate practice was less important that Ericsson et al. claimed, Ericsson...argued that many of the included studies should have been excluded because they do not meet the criteria for deliberate practice. Specifically, he stated, ‘The absence of a teacher for all or most of the accumulated practice time violates the definition [of deliberate practice].’ He rejected a number of studies included in the meta-analysis, including several of his own studies, because the ‘[a]rticles do not record a teacher or coach supervising and guiding all or most of the practice.’

In contrast with the definition of deliberate practice where activities need to be designed by a teacher, Ericsson has sometimes argued that practice activities do not need be designed by a teacher to qualify as deliberate practice. In line with this definition, Ericsson et al. asked participants to estimate hours of ‘practice alone’ with no apparent restriction to teacher-designed practice. ...

If deliberate practice is assumed to be the most important activity for improving performance, then our results do not support the notion that practice activities need to be designed by a teacher to qualify as deliberate practice. ...

[18]

...

...our findings suggest one of two definitions of deliberate practice should be adopted. The first possibility is that deliberate practice (at least in classical music) should clearly and consistently be defined as ‘practice alone’. ...

The other possibility is that deliberate practice should follow Ericsson’s definition that practice activities do not need to be designed by a teacher to qualify as deliberate practice. ...

We believe that theoretical definitions should be empirically tested and not changed depending on the argument. As an example of such a change based on argument, take Tuffiash et al.’s study of expert Scrabble players. Tuffiash et al. described the experts’ practice as ‘activities that best met the theoretical description of deliberate practice’ . And, citing that study, Ericsson et al. later described those same activities as ‘meeting the criteria of deliberate practice’. However, when arguing against the meta-analytic results, Ericsson rejected this same study because the activities ‘violate our original definition of deliberate practice’. Definitions of key theoretical terms must be consistent in order to accumulate evidence for or against a theory.

Hmm.

The Tuffiash paper is paywalled, but the abstact suggests that findings were strongly in favor of nurture as against nature. This comports with my firsthand experience in Scrabble. It does not comport with my firsthand experience in music. Which is to say: I don't think that we should expect to find, eventually, some theory of "expertise" which is ultimately generalizable across disciplines.

DAVID Z. HAMBRICK, FERNANDA FERREIRA, AND JOHN M. HENDERSON
Practice Does Not Make Perfect
SEPT 28, 2014 7:45 PM

the cognitive psychologists Fernand Gobet and Guillermo Campitelli found that chess players differed greatly in the amount of deliberate practice they needed to reach a given skill level in chess. For example, the number of hours of deliberate practice to first reach “master” status (a very high level of skill) ranged from 728 hours to 16,120 hours. This means that one player needed 22 times more deliberate practice than another player to become a master.

... We searched through more than 9,000 potentially relevant publications and ultimately identified 88 studies that collected measures of activities interpretable as deliberate practice and reported their relationships to corresponding measures of skill. ... With very few exceptions, deliberate practice correlated positively with skill. ... But the correlations were far from perfect: Deliberate practice left more of the variation in skill unexplained than it explained. ...

What are these other factors? ... One may be the age at which a person starts an activity. ...Gobet and Campitelli found that chess players who started playing early reached higher levels of skill as adults than players who started later, even after taking into account the fact that the early starters had accumulated more deliberate practice than the later starters. ...

Wouldn’t it be better to just act as if we are equal, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding? That way, no people will be discouraged from chasing their dreams—competing in the Olympics or performing at Carnegie Hall or winning a Nobel Prize. The answer is no, for two reasons. The first is that failure is costly, both to society and to individuals. ...

The second reason we should not pretend we are endowed with the same abilities is that doing so perpetuates the myth that is at the root of much inaction in society—the myth that people can help themselves to the same degree if they just try hard enough. ...

This is trite intellectual territory, but the reminder is always welcome: neither of the facile poles of the "merit" discourse are coherent in and of themselves.

Our abilities might not be identical, and our needs surely differ, but our basic human rights are universal.

But I'm not sure this is coherent either. "Basic human rights" ought to reflect "needs" and not wants. But "if our needs surely differ," then this purported "universal"-ity is in some kind of trouble.

Goodman and Goodman: "If freedom is the aim, everything beyond the minimum must be rigorously excluded, even if it should be extremely cheap to provide; for it is more important to limit political intervention than to raise the standard of living."

And earlier, the authors warn against the type of argument which

conflates scientific evidence with how that evidence might be used—which is to say that information about genetic diversity can just as easily be used for good as for ill.

Yep, and that's why Philosophy, like Jazz and The Author, won't die even after it has been killed. Science without Philosophy is just educated nihilism.

Fernand Gobet and Morgan H. Ereku
Checkmate to Deliberate Practice: The Case of Magnus Carlsen
(2014)

[1]

...

As top performers have spent similar number of hours to improve and maintain their skills, the fact that individuals...have so outrageously dominated their sport throws considerable doubt on the deliberate practice framework.

Previously I thought I might be losing my mind since no academics ever seem to mention this more naturalistic data , which could more concisely be called "paying attention."

Brooke N. Macnamara, David Z. Hambrick, and Frederick L. Oswald
Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education, and Professions: A Meta-Analysis
(2014)

[2]

...

... We made no prediction about how the strength of the relationship between deliberate practice and performance would vary across domains. However, we did predict that this relationship would generally be more positive for high-predictability activities than for low-predictability activities, on the basis of findings that effects of training on performance are stronger when the task environment is more predictable.

...

[5]

...

Theoretical moderators. Domain was a statistically significant moderator... Percentage of variance in performance explained by deliberate practice was 26% for games, 21% for music, 18% for sports..., 4% for education..., and less than 1% for professions...

Predictability of the task environment was also a statistically significant moderator,... As hypothesized, the percentage of variance in performance explained by deliberate practice was largest (24%) for activities high in predictability..., intermediate (12%) for activities moderate in predictability..., and smallest (4%) for activities low in predictability...

Methodological moderators. The method used to assess deliberate practice was a statistically significant moderator,... The percentage of variance in performance explained by deliberate practice was 20% for studies that used a retrospective interview..., 12% for studies that used a retrospective questionnaire..., and 5% for studies that used a log method...

The method used to assess performance was also a statistically significant moderator,... The percentage of variance in performance explained by deliberate practice was 26% for studies that used group membership..., 14% for studies that used laboratory tasks, 9% for studies that used expert ratings..., and 8% for studies that used standardized objective scoring measures...

[8]

The second ["additional"] model included only the 59 effect sizes for solitary deliberate practice (games: 6; music: 9; sports: 14; education: 30; professions: 0). We tested this model to address the question of whether deliberate practice must be performed in isolation to be maximally effective. The overall percentage of variance explained by deliberate practice was 11% in this model (games: 23%; music: 23%; sports: 22%; and education: 3%;..., which indicates that solitary deliberate practice is not a stronger predictor of performance than deliberate practice with other people.

...

General Discussion

...

... Why were the effect sizes for education and professions so much smaller? One possibility is that deliberate practice is less well defined in these domains. It could also be that in some of the studies, participants differed in amount of prestudy expertise (e.g., amount of domain knowledge before taking an academic course or accepting a job) and thus in the amount of deliberate practice they needed to achieve a given level of performance.

...

[9]

...

... Ericsson et al. (1993) argued that any performance advantage associated with starting age simply reflects the fact that a person who starts at a young age has more time to accumulate deliberate practice than a person who starts at a later age. However, Gobet and Campitelli (2007) and Howard (2012) found that starting age negatively predicted chess rating even after statistically controlling for deliberate practice. This evidence suggests that there may be an optimal developmental period for acquiring complex skills, as there seems to be for acquiring language.

Brooke N. Macnamara and David J. Frank
How do Task Characteristics Affect Learning and Performance? The Roles of Variably Mapped and Dynamic Tasks
(2018)

I look forward to seeing that angle applied back to music, where much of this chatter got started, because I've known some great musicians whose, uh,... general cognitive ability was not terribly impressive in any other domain, and I've seen some very smart students struggle mightily with elementary "general music." (Oliver Sacks has of course documented some extreme examples arising from congenital conditions or later injury.)

Certainly there is a just aversion to bringing things like job classifications into the artistic/creative side of this discussion. But honestly, the more I've been privileged to actually "work at playing," i.e. the more I've had to put up with mis- placement and subpar occupational   performance , the more willing I have gotten to broach things in those terms. Of course when I was underemployed it was easier to parrot the notion that there are too many musicians and not enough work. Now I'm working and, hate to say it, but there seems to be about as much work as there are really good musicians to do it.

Also, don't forget that musicians can join or leave the expert cohort at any point in life, not just at the beginning and end!

Alexander P. Burgoyne, David Z. Hambrick, & Brooke N. Macnamara
How Firm Are the Foundations of Mindset Theory? The Claims Appear Stronger than the Evidence
(2020)

(From a word doc, hence pagination probably differs from published version.)

[3]

There is currently a great deal of scientific interest in mindset (i.e., implicit theories). Mindset refers to people’s beliefs about the nature of personal attributes, such as intelligence. People who hold growth mindsets (i.e., incremental theorists) believe attributes are malleable, whereas those who hold fixed mindsets (i.e., entity theorists) believe attributes are unchangeable (Dweck, 2006). According to Dweck (2006), “the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life” (p. 6). The rationale is that mindsets form the “core” of people’s meaning systems, bringing together goals, beliefs, and behaviors to shape people’s thoughts and actions (Dweck & Yeager, 2019).

Honestly, the only place I've ever seen the phrase "growth mindset" is on dating sites, where I have seen it on most (seemingly all) profiles of people in banking, finance, real estate, accounting, etc., and on very few others. Like many such sayings which people fall back on, the misprision eventually becomes part of the new meaning. Hence to me, now, it seems to refer simultaneously to personal, financial, reputational and familial "growth." But here is its actual source, apparently.

The presumed importance of mindset rests on several theoretical premises. ...

Premise 1: People with Growth Mindsets Hold Learning Goals

...according to Dweck and Yeager (2019), mindset theory was developed to explain why some people care more about improving their ability (i.e., learning goals) whereas others care more about proving their ability (i.e., performance goals). ...

[4]

...

Premise 2: People with Fixed Mindsets Hold Performance Goals

Dweck (2000) stated,

Believing that your qualities are carved in stone—the fixed mindset—creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over….I’ve seen so many people with this one consuming goal of proving themselves—... (p. 6, emphasis added).

...people with fixed mindsets “have to look good at all times” and “the cardinal rule is: Look talented at all costs” (p. 4). ...

Premise 3: People with Fixed Mindsets Hold Performance-Avoidance Goals

Burnette, O'Boyle, VanEpps, Pollack, and Finkel (2013) stated, “although entity theorists prioritize performance goals more than incremental theorists do, we suggest that this difference is especially strong for performance-avoidance goals.” (p. 660). Dweck (2002) has also described how people with fixed mindsets supposedly avoid performing tasks if they might fail:...

[5]

...

Premise 4: People with Fixed Mindsets Believe That Talent Alone–Without Effort–Creates Success

...“Those with a fixed mindset believe that if you have natural talent, you shouldn’t need much effort”... ...people with fixed mindsets “believe that talent alone creates success–without effort”...

Premise 5: People with Growth Mindsets Persist to Overcome Challenge

Rattan et al. (2015) explained, “students with growth mindsets…pursue challenges…and are resilient to setbacks; in contrast, students with fixed mindsets avoid challenges…and give up more easily when facing setbacks” (p. 722). Indeed, mindset has been described as “a theory of challenge-seeking and resilience” (Dweck & Yeager, 2019, p. 482). ... ...the for-profit mindset-intervention company Mindset Works (co-founded by Dweck) explains on their website: “Children with a growth mindset persist in the face of challenges”...

[6]

Premise 6: People with Growth Mindsets Are More Resilient Following Failure

According to Yeager and Dweck (2012), mindsets “appear to create different psychological worlds for students: one that promotes resilience and one that does not” (p. 304). ... By contrast, individuals with fixed mindsets are “devastated by setbacks” (Dweck, 2008). ...

Prior Evidence for Premises

...despite the claim that people with growth mindsets care first and foremost about learning (Premise 1), a recent meta-analysis found the correlation between mindset and learning goal orientation was only !̅= .19 (Burnette et al., 2013). For comparison, other personality constructs correlate much more strongly with learning goal orientation: self-efficacy (!̅= .56); need for achievement (!̅= .38); openness to experience (!̅= .34) (Payne, Youngcourt, & Beaubien, 2007). Burnette et al.’s meta-analysis also revealed weak evidence for Premises 2 and 3:...

[7]

We could find no evidence that people with fixed mindsets believe that talent without effort creates success (Premise 4). ...most studies do not test mindset’s relationship with persistence towards a real-world challenging goal that is important to the individual.

Few studies have examined the relationship between one’s naturally-held mindset and resilience to failure (Premise 6). Rather, studies that examined resilience to failure by “helpless” and “mastery-oriented” children.. ..or after manipulating praise (Mueller & Dweck, 1998) have been interpreted as evidence of mindset’s relationship with resilience... However, Li & Bates (2019) directly tested this relationship. In one sample, they found no association between mindset and performance following failure. In another sample, they found that students with fixed mindsets performed better than students with growth mindsets following failure.

Present Study

...

[8]

...

Method

...

[12]

...

Results

...

[20]

Discussion

...

Although we did not find robust support for mindset theory’s premises in terms of statistical significance, some might argue that small associations have practical significance. However, without robust evidence that associations are nonzero, as is the case with half the premises tested, there is no evidence of practical significance. ... We found that mindset accounted for 1% of learning goal orientation variance. By comparison, a meta-analysis found that self-esteem, need for achievement, and general self-efficacy explained 10%, 14%, and 31% of learning goal orientation variance, respectively (Payne et al., 2007).

[21]

...

David Z. Hambrick, Brooke N. Macnamara, and Frederick L. Oswald
Is the Deliberate Practice View Defensible? A Review of Evidence and Discussion of Issues
(2020)

[2]

...here we will discuss what we believe are serious concerns with whether the deliberate practice view is viable as a scientific theory—that is, whether it is empirically testable and falsifiable. ... Before doing so, however, we note two uncontroversial claims about expertise, by which we simply mean a person’s measurable (i.e., quantifiable) level of performance in a domain. First, as Ericsson and colleagues have emphasized... , expertise is acquired gradually. In other words, people are not literally born as experts,...

The second uncontroversial claim is that training can lead to large, even massive, improvements in people’s level of expertise (i.e., domain-relevant performance). ...

...

WHAT IS DELIBERATE PRACTICE

...

[4]

...

Challenges to the Deliberate Practice View

...

New Types of Practice

...

[7]

...

...Ericsson and colleagues went from arguing that activities exist that meet the criteria for deliberate practice in the boardgame SCRABBLE, to arguing that it is not possible to engage in deliberate practice in SCRABBLE. Specifically, referring to Tuffiash et al.’s (2007) SCRABBLE study, Ericsson et al. (2009) stated that “[s]everal researchers have reported a consistent association between the amount and quality of solitary activities meeting the criteria of deliberate practice and

[8]

performance in different domains of expertise, such as. . .Scrabble (Tuffiash et al., 2007)” (p. 9). However, Moxley et al. (2019) wrote that because SCRABBLE lacks professional coaches “SCRABBLE players cannot engage in deliberate practice, but only purposeful practice and other types of practice” (p. 1150). Under this new framework, activities that once qualified as deliberate practice are now classified as less effective purposeful practice. Of course, it is appropriate for a theorist to reinterpret past evidence as a theory is refined and revised over time. But it is a serious problem, as in this case, when the reinterpretations of evidence are not explicitly acknowledged, explained, and justified. ...

An awful lot of this seems to hinge on the presence or absence of a coach/teacher. Too much, I would say.

(In any case, there are some Scrabble (i.e. SCRABBLE) coaches out there, mostly outside of the U.S.)

... [10]

...

HOW IMPORTANT IS DELIBERATE PRACTICE?

...

[11]

...

IS THE DELIBERATE PRACTICE VIEW DEFENSIBLE?

...

[12]

...

TOWARD A MULTIFACTORIAL MODEL OF EXPERTISE

...

Developmental Factors

... The early specialization view argues that the earlier the training can begin, the better. ... Because it is both physically and psychologically taxing, a person can engage in only a few hours of deliberate practice a day... without burnout and/or injury. Therefore, the individual who begins training at a relatively late age (e.g., age 12) can never catch up to the individual who begins training earlier (e.g., age 6). However, in a meta-analysis of sports studies with samples representing a wide range of skill, we found no evidence for an earlier average starting age for high-skill athletes relative to lower-skill athletes. Furthermore, research suggests that the highest (elite) levels of sports performance are associated with a later starting age, combined with participation in a diverse range of sports in adolescence. ...

Experiential Factors

...

[13]

..in Güllich’s (2017) study... he not only found that the medalists had accumulated significantly less main-sport practice than their less-accomplished counterparts during childhood/adolescence, but also that the medalists had accumulated significantly more experience with other sports during this period...

Ability Factors

Research has firmly established that cognitive ability explains a statistically and practically significant amount of the variability in people’s acquisition of complex skills... That is, people higher in cognitive ability learn complex skills more readily and rapidly than people lower in cognitive ability. ... Ericsson (2014d) has theorized that general cognitive ability is important initially in acquiring complex skills, but its predictive power diminishes as domain-specific skills and knowledge are acquired, stating:

For individuals who have acquired cognitive structures that support a high level of performance the expert performance framework predicts that these acquired cognitive structures will directly mediate superior performance and thus diminishing correlations between general cognitive ability and domain-specific performance (p. 84).

For complex tasks of interest to expertise researchers, evidence for this claim, which we termed the circumvention-of-limits hypothesis (Hambrick and Meinz, 2011), is weak and inconsistent. In a recent review (Hambrick et al., 2019), we searched through approximately 1,300 articles and identified 15 studies... relevant to this hypothesis. Of the 15 studies, only three yielded any evidence supportive of the circumvention-of-limits hypothesis. Moreover, methodological limitations... precluded any strong conclusions from those few studies. Providing what might be considered the strongest evidence for the hypothesis, one of these three studies that seem to support the circumvention-of-limits hypothesis was a meta-analysis of chess studies... As determined by a moderator test, fluid intelligence correlated significantly more strongly with chess rating in lower-skill chess players (avg. r = 0.32) than in higher-skill chess players (avg. r = 0.14). However, it is important to note that skill level was highly confounded with age (i.e., lower-ability samples were youth, whereas higher-ability samples were adults), limiting the strength of the evidence in support of the circumvention-oflimits hypothesis.

We also note that results that have sometimes been used to argue that the influence of general cognitive ability on expertise diminishes with increasing skill do not warrant this conclusion. ... Ruthsatz et al. (2008) found that a measure of general cognitive ability... correlated positively and significantly with musical accomplishment in high school band members (r = 0.25, p < 0.05), but not in university music majors (r = 0.24) or conservatory students (r = 0.12).

Cute.

However, the critical question is not whether the lower-skill group correlation is statistically significant while the higher-skill group correlations are not. Rather, it is whether the former correlation and the latter correlations are significantly different from each other, as determined by the appropriate statistical test. As it happens, in the Ruthsatz et al. (2008) study, the correlations are not significantly different from each other (all z tests for differences in correlations are statistically non-significant). Thus, the results of Ruthsatz et al.’s (2008) study fail to support the hypothesis that ability-performance correlations diminish with increasing skill.

We also reviewed evidence relevant to the circumvention-of-limits hypothesis from the job performance literature, and here the evidence is more consistent and interpretable. General cognitive ability is regarded as the single best predictor of job training performance, and of subsequent job performance... ...

Genetic and Environmental Influences

Research in the field of behavioral genetics has demonstrated that both genetic and environmental variance across individuals

[14]

contribute to the total variance in a wide range of behavioral outcomes (Turkheimer, 2000), including ability factors that have been found to correlate with measures of expertise. ... Because some of these factors correlate with expertise, it stands to reason that both genetic and environmental variance may also contribute to the total variance in expertise. Furthermore, basic abilities and characteristics that may predict individual differences in expertise have also been observed to be substantially heritable, including drawing ability (Arden et al., 2014), music aptitude (Ullén et al., 2014; see Mosing et al., 2018, for a review), and maximal oxygen consumption in athletic performance...

At the same time, no psychological trait is 100% heritable (Turkheimer, 2000), and even the most heritable psychological trait will have a sizeable environmental component. For example, heritability estimates for measures of general cognitive ability are typically in the 50 to 70% range in samples drawn from developed countries (e.g., Tucker-Drob and Bates, 2016), with the remaining variance (as much as 50%) explained by shared and/or non-shared environmental factors. This means that correlations between a measure of some trait (e.g., general cognitive ability) and a measure of expertise could be driven by the genetic variance or the environmental variance in the trait measure, or by both types of variances. In other words, the finding that a measure of a heritable trait correlates with expertise is only consistent with the possibility that genetic variance is a component of individual differences in expertise.

It is also critical to note that genes and environments cannot generally be assumed to be uncorrelated across people. Rather, across people, genetically influenced factors may contribute to variance in the environments which people seek out and are exposed to. This is the idea of gene-environment correlation, or rGE (Plomin et al., 1977). For example, just as children who are tall might be more interested in playing basketball and more likely to be selected to play on basketball teams than children who are shorter, those with a high level of music aptitude may be more likely to take up, be selected for, and persist in music than those with a lower level of this aptitude. Consistent with this sort of speculation, there is now evidence to indicate that the propensity to practice in a domain is substantially heritable. In a large twin study, Mosing, Ullén, and colleagues found an average heritability of around 50% for accumulated amount of music practice (Mosing et al., 2014; see also Hambrick and TuckerDrob, 2015). A possible explanation for this finding is that music aptitude, as well as more general ability and non-ability factors, differentially predispose people to engaging in music practice.

...

[15]

...“A typical human behavioral trait is associated with very many genetic variants, each of which accounts for a very small percentage of the behavioral variability” (Chabris et al., 2015, p. 305). Research is uncovering genetic variants that may contribute to individual differences in expertise, but it is highly unrealistic to expect that any one of these factors will account for a large amount of the variance in expertise.

Putting It All Together

...

THE PATH AHEAD IN EXPERTISE RESEARCH

...

Recommendations For Expertise Research

...

... It is axiomatic in the psychological methods literature that virtually no observed measure (or indicator) is “construct pure.” That is, a score collected by an instrument (test, questionnaire, etc.) designed

[16]

to measure a given hypothetical construct may reflect that construct to some degree, but it will certainly reflect other, construct-irrelevant factors, such as participants’ familiarity with a particular method of assessment... and psychological states that may affect their responding... There is no perfect way to deal with this problem, but when multiple measures of a construct are obtained, it becomes possible to use data-analytic techniques... that are explicitly designed to deal with this issue by allowing researchers to model latent variables that are closer to theoretical constructs of interest than observed variables are.

...the sample of participants from the targeted domain should ideally represent a wide range of performance rather than extreme groups. ...categories such as “novice” and “expert” are not naturally occurring—they are groups of performers created based on ultimately arbitrary cuts on performance scores. Accordingly, scientific research on expertise should endeavor to explain the full range of performance differences within different domains rather than differences between artificial groups of performers, and also continuities and discontinuities across this range (see Bliese and Lang, 2016).

For once the the woolly-headed pomos reached the destination before the hardnecked empiricists, this via the superficial political appeal of "studying everybody."

If these scientists really have found that the cuts between categories such as “novice” and “expert” really, truly have been made arbitrarily by previous generations of researchers, then I ought to be willing to take their word for it. I do wonder even so if pointing out that said "categories" are not naturally occurring is not a bit of a strawman. The social demarcation of novice and expert in music, e.g., though it certainly is an "arbitrary" demarcation in a sizable minority of cases, is on the whole rooted in some discernible fundamentals, some of which, I would think, could actually be isolated, classified, and observed "scientifically." If, on the other hand, these types of social factors are found to be really no different than those aspects of SCRABBLE which can be practiced "purposefully" but not "deliberately," then that would resolve the tension and set the stage for consideration of the full range .

e.g. Some musicians who are, let's say, not very good, nonetheless find some work based on their knowledge of particular repertoire, of various written and unwritten codes of comportment, and a thousand other "skills" which could be acquired by almost anybody regardless of musical or cognitive aptitude. It's totally reasonable for laboratory psychologists to decide that these are not actually experts, not even if pet columnists for the International Musician, Maoists in Hollenbeck park, the IRS, et al, for their own reasons persist in arguing the contrary. But the question then becomes, where out here in the so-called Real World can one lay one's own eyes and ears on the "empirical" reality of skill acquisition? If the musicians playing for your kid's birthday party are mere kleine-experts, where can we find the uber-experts?

In other words: on one side we have "expertise researchers" looking into how people get good at things, but necessarily compartmentalized from the question of whether other people actually think and behave as if people who have gotten good at things are good at them. And on the other side we have "people" living their lives, having various wants and needs arise therein, and unable to fully optimize the meeting of said wants and needs in part because they will not/cannot quite accept experthood where and how it actually exists: they want medical advice that doesn't conflict with their designer religion; they prefer musical performers and major-league athletes who look, talk and act like them; etc. "Where does expertise come from?" is one question. "...and where does it go?" is another question.

Michael Barth · Arne Güllich · Brooke N. Macnamara · David Z. Hambrick
Predictors of Junior Versus Senior Elite Performance are Opposite: A Systematic Review and Meta‑Analysis of Participation Patterns
(2022)

[1399]

...

1   Introduction

....

[1400, boxed] Key Points

Short-term junior-age athletic success is facilitated by an early start in the main sport, rapid initial progress, and intensive specialized coach-led practice in the main sport, with little or no practice in other sports.
Long-term adult-age success is facilitated by extensive childhood/adolescent multi-sport practice, relatively late start in the main sport, gradual initial progress, and only moderate childhood/adolescent specialized main-sport practice.
Peer-led play in the main sport or in other sports has negligible efects on both junior and senior performance.

...

Ericsson et al. proposed that performance is monotonically related to the cumulative amount of deliberate practice:... By inference, investing time and efort in other types of sport activities... reduces the amount of deliberate practice and thereby performance. Ericsson et al. also emphasized the importance of rapid initial performance progress...

In contrast, the early diversifcation path of the DMSP ["Developmental Model of Sport Participation"] holds that, although deliberate practice is necessary, single-sport specialization and intensive deliberate practice should not commence until adolescence. This late specialization should be preceded by extensive childhood/adolescent deliberate play in various sports: “pick-up” games that are regulated by the participants, not by a coach (i.e., peer-led play), and are undertaken for the inherent enjoyment of the game rather than to improve performance...

Early specialization and early diversifcation have typically been regarded as two contrasting, dichotomous participation patterns , but this is an imprecise characterization. An athlete’s participation pattern is generally characterized by several continuous, quantitative variables, including starting age and amounts of coach-led practice and peer-led play, both in the athlete’s main sport and in other sports . These continuous variables thus provide a more accurate and detailed description of athletes’ participation patterns. In addition, to investigate relationships between these participation variables and performance, an artifcially dichotomized specialization–diversifcation construct is neither needed nor benefcial. Therefore, we do not follow the dichotomized specialization–diversifcation approach, but rather focus on continuous, quantitative participation variables.

The empirical evidence from studies using these continuous predictor variables is mixed... However, when distinguishing studies based on the performance levels compared and whether the samples were junior (youth) or senior (adults competing in the open-age category, typically in their 20s and 30s) athletes, some consistency became apparent . In numerous studies, higher junior performance was correlated with a faster rate of childhood/adolescent performance progress, greater amounts of main-sport coach-led practice, and less other-sports practice. By contrast, studies comparing the highest adult performance levels—senior world class and national class—suggested that world-class performance was associated with greater amounts of (earlier, childhood/adolescent) other-sports coach-led practice and slower childhood/adolescent progress and was uncorrelated or negatively correlated with the amount of main-sport coach-led practice.

...

[1401]

...

2   Methods

...

[1405]

...

3   Results

...

[1409]

...

4   Discussion

Across diferent types of sports, analyses revealed five central fndings that answered our research questions.

1. Participation patterns predicted performance. ...
2. Compared with their national-class counterparts, senior world-class athletes engaged in more childhood/adolescent coach-led practice in sports other than their main sport and, relatedly, began playing their main sport later; accumulated less main-sport practice; and reached performance milestones in their main sport at a slower rate.
3. Predictors of junior-age performance were opposite of those of senior-age performance: ...
4. Peer-led play in either the athlete’s main sport or in other sports had negligible efects on both junior and senior performance.
5. Efects of age to reach milestones, starting age, amount of main-sport practice, and amount of other-sports practice were not independent but were closely associated with one another.

...

4.1   Theoretical Implications

...

...The data indicate that athletes whose development was particularly accelerated in childhood/adolescence—typically through intensive specialized main-sport practice—were frequent among the eventual senior national-class athletes (and also among the most successful junior athletes) but were infrequent among the eventual senior world-class performers.

[1410]

How can this complex and partly counterintuitive pattern of fndings be explained? ... The aforementioned concepts—deliberate practice, deliberate play, and giftedness —are partly consistent with the predictors of junior performance. However, they do not provide adequate approaches to explain the highest adult performance levels, primarily because their central premises are inconsistent with the empirical evidence. Alternatively, we suggest that approaches from neoclassical economics may provide a fruitful heuristic, especially the concepts of efficiency and sustainability.

...

1. The goal is to achieve success at international senior championships,... However, international senior success is an extremely scarce good... An athlete’s career is therefore characterized by great uncertainty of success.
2. Resources are restricted and must be economized:...
3. ... Coaches and athletes pursue the participation pattern that yields the optimal ratio of benefts, costs, and risks over the short and long term; i.e., a classical problem of the optimization of the allocation of resources. ...
4. Because (1) resources are limited and (2) one endeavors to increase benefits while limiting costs and risks, the efficiency of practice is paramount. In economic terms: the marginal productivity, Δ performance / Δ practice over time, see Eq. 1. Following the Gossenian law of diminishing marginal productivity , the more main-sport practice previously accumulated, the lower the added gain in performance per added unit of mainsport practice .
5. The higher the competition level, the greater the value of every unit of absolute performance improvement: small differences in absolute performance (velocity run, distance jumped, successful shots made) make great diferences to an athlete’s championship level and placing, i.e., relative performance. For example, at an international level, 0.1 s in a race may distinguish the gold medalist from a non-medalist. In economic terms, the marginal revenue product increases with age and competition level .

[1411]

...

...the world-class athletes’ combination of reduced childhood/adolescent investment in specialized main-sport practice with greater diversifed engagement in multi-sport practice was associated with lower initial marginal productivity, but greater sustainability, in that it yielded greater long-term marginal productivity (efficiency of practice, Δ relative performance/Δ practice amount,...

Notably, world-class athletes’ enhanced efficiency of practice was exactly located in the age period and competition level of the greatest marginal revenue product, i.e., where relatively small differences in absolute performance made great differences in championship level and placing (relative performance)

Most of this seems inapplicable to music, but I think this last part might be.

And, uh...hate to say it, but the obvious folk-explanation is that the eventual senior world-class types didn't have to practice in order to achieve success at the junior levels. This is also consistent with neoclassical economics , no?

...

... Our economic interpretation is underpinned by three inter-related hypotheses discussed in the literature:

1. Childhood/adolescent multi-sport engagement is associated with reduced risks of later overuse injuries and burnout...
2. Practice and competition experiences in various sports increase the odds that athletes fnd the sport that best matches their talent and preferences... ...the “talent identifcation” for a sport occurs a posteriori not a priori...
3. Varied learning experiences... may expand the potential for future long-term learning,... First, varied learning experiences facilitate the athlete’s ability to adapt to diferent learning tasks, situations, methodologies, and available information for learning. ... Second, the athlete experiences various learning designs that vary in efficacy for the individual athlete; these experiences help them understand individually more and less athlete-functional learning solutions...
   
   [1412 (visuals)]
   ...
   [1413]
   
   ...

According to these hypotheses, athletes who engage in excess childhood/adolescent specialized main-sport practice may more likely be hampered by (later) overuse injuries and/or burnout, may have a greater risk of “malinvestment” in a suboptimal sports match, and may have limited opportunities to expand their learning capital for future long-term learning. In contrast, senior world-class athletes’ pattern of childhood/adolescent multi-sport practice with relatively less main-sport practice was likely associated with reduced risks of (later) overuse injury and/or burnout, increased odds that they selected a main sport at which they are particularly talented, and improved long-term perceptual–motor skill learning.

The hypotheses are also supported by three fndings from several previous studies... (1) Childhood/adolescent multi-sport practice did not have a direct effect on main-sport performance but had a delayed moderator effect, such that it facilitated the athlete’s later main-sport efficiency of practice; (2) the effect rested on improved later perceptual–motor learning, not physical development; (3) the effect was not moderated by the relatedness of the different sports an athlete engaged in. ...

...

4.2   Methodological Considerations

The study has several strengths,... But it does have limitations. First, the retrospective and correlational design of many original studies may not have controlled for potential confounds or selection effects (e.g., survivor bias). ... Nevertheless, the major findings are entirely consistent with recent studies that controlled for potential confounds through matched-pairs designs and multivariate analyses,... Second, we did not consider the “micro-structure” of an athlete’s main-sport practice (e.g., types of exercises, ways of executing them). However, several studies reported consistent findings from athletes who participated in the same training groups and thus the same main-sport practice... Third, we did not analyze potential interactions of other factors with participation patterns, such as athletes’ genotype, gene–environment interaction, familial support, or psychological characteristics. Fourth, male samples were over-represented and female samples were under-represented... Fifth, sample sizes and statistical power varied across meta-analytic models. Sixth, as in any systematic review and meta-analysis, although we used multiple databases, bias of availability, country, and language was possible. Finally, the quality of evidence was low for main-sport play and other-sports play.

1. Introduction

People are often challenged when having to learn new skills in a limited amount of time. In many cases, the most efficient way to learn a skill is to break it down to its core components and gradually increase complexity. ...

However, not all learning occurs from early, formal instruction... Without guided instruction, we typically apply various solutions to new situations often making numerous errors . Slowly, patterns that lead to more directed and efficient manners of problem-solving are discovered . ...

... One important component in the study of learning and memory is the transfer of learning—the idea that the concepts learned from one situation can be applied to another . Numerous studies have shown that transfer of learning through training can improve one’s performance on more complex tasks .

The transfer of learning can be divided into two types: near and far transfer. Near transfer—the application of learned situations to new, yet similar situations (as opposed to far transfer, which is associated with new and relatively different situations;...

[2 of 13]

...—has often been studied for its application to spatial problems...

Spatial problem-solving is considered a key component in a number of performance domains... ...only a small percentage of studies [of the "Tower of Hanoi" spatial task] has investigated training progressions,... The schema theory of discrete motor learning posits that schemas form as rules and parameters that are compared to novel situations. ... In support of the theory of discrete motor learning, Vakil and Heled (2016) found that participants in the varied training condition yielded better learning transfer than participants in the constant training condition.

However, in spatial problem-solving tasks, it has yet to be tested what type of varied training leads to better transfer. ... Outside of spatial problem-solving, a working-memory training study (von Bastian and Eschen 2016) suggested that random variation may be sufficient.

von Bastian and Eschen (2016) were not the first to suggest that random variation may be beneficial for learning and perhaps more so than progressive sequences. ... According to schema theory , variability in practice is beneficial because it enhances the effectiveness of rules (schemata). ...

Present Study

...

We specifically chose the Rubik’s Cube for its difficulty. Whereas the Tower of Hanoi is fairly simple and training gains are easily found, only six percent of the global population has solved a Rubik’s Cube . ...

[3 of 13]

...

2. Materials and Methods

...

[6 of 13]

3. Results

...

[9 of 13]

...

4. Discussion

... Our results demonstrated no difference between the progression and variable-order conditions. However, we also did not find that participants in these conditions outperformed participants in the consistent-difficulty condition, limiting the support our results offer for suggesting any variability is important or for the schema theory of discrete motor skill learning, which also suggests participants should yield better transfer from varied versus consistent training.

Our results support our hypothesis that participants’ fluid reasoning would be positively correlated with performance on the spatial reasoning test, across conditions. ...

...our results are in line with other studies that have found that spatial reasoning predicts performance but does not interact with the type of training. ...

Considering the results of Vakil and Heled (2016), in which varied training on the Tower of Hanoi led to better schematic representation of the problem, we believe the lack of a superior method of learning may arise from the difficulty of the Rubik’s Cube. ...

[10 of 13]

...it may also be the case that varied training may be paradigm specific rather than widespread across spatial reasoning problems.

Arne Güllich, Michael Barth, David Z. Hambrick, and Brooke N. Macnamara
Participation Patterns in Talent Development in Youth Sports
(2023)

[01]

1. Introduction

...

[02]

2. Review of Current Research

2.1. Evaluation of the constructs of early specialization, deliberate practice, and deliberate play

...

The construct of early specialization is problematic for research, primarily because it is not a sound scientific construct in several regards...

1. There is no theoretically and/or empirically based definition of the construct...
2. Early specialization has referred to varying age periods...
3. Early specialization has commonly been described as one composite construct composed of several constituents...

Most constituents lack operational definitions, and both the activity attributes and athletes’ motives (b, e) have typically been ascribed to the “specialized” activity, not empirically determined. ...

Ok, so this seems to leave open the possibility that there is some version of the concept which could have validity, it just hasn't been nailed down yet owing to some sloppy preliminaries (which does, yes, in 2024 make you wonder a bit about "science" per se).

Ericsson et al. (5) proposed that youth athletes should start deliberate practice at a young age and should subsequently maximize their amount of deliberate practice: individual sport-specific practice that is instructed and monitored by a coach, includes frequent repetition of a task, is done to improve one’s performance, and is highly effortful and not inherently enjoyable. The authors partly ascribed activity attributes they deemed effective to performance (solitariness, effort, low enjoyment, performance motive) by way of synthetic a priori attribution rather than empirical evidence... Furthermore, athletes typically report high inherent enjoyment of practice activities that meet deliberate practice criteria, while their developmental sport engagement also includes extensive activities outside the original definition of deliberate practice: Team practice, playing forms, and competitions . Consequently, Ericsson acknowledged that his conceptualization of deliberate practice has limited applicability to the sports domain.

I did find that the enjoyment question did arise persistently while reading Ericcson and Pool. I wonder if when people are reasonably at liberty there really is no such thing as "sacrifice?"

In their proposal of early diversification, Côté et al. suggested that youth athletes should delay increasing single-sport deliberate practice to the “investment stage” (16–18 years). This late specialization should be preceded by a “sampling stage” (6–12 years) and a “specialization stage” (13–15 years) with extensive deliberate play in multiple sports: Informal non-organized play that is regulated by the participants, rather than by a coach (i.e., peer-led), and is done for the inherent enjoyment of play, not for performance improvement (e.g., backyard soccer, street hockey, ice-hockey on a frozen lake). The authors distinguished deliberate play from other activities by several attributes (e.g., variability, time-on-task, motives, inherent enjoyment) and outcomes (skill transfer, future intrinsic motivation, prolonged engagement) ascribed by way of synthetic a priori attribution and extrapolation from general childhood non-sport play... Furthermore, the age demarcations of Côté et al.’s (3) “stages” were normatively set rather than empirically determined and cannot take account of the great individual variation and gradual changes of different developmental sport activities through the course of an athletic career. In addition, given that age periods and amounts of each type of sport activity can be empirically recorded, an a priori normative categorization of career stages is unnecessary, but may constrict empirical research.

"investment stage" I think this is what a lot of musicians do.

Brooke N. Macnamara, Richard W. Prather & Alexander P. Burgoyne
Beliefs about success are prone to cognitive fallacies
(2023)

[716]

...

Fallacies in theories of achievement

Although the evidence in support of popular theories of achievement is weak, they are intuitively appealing because they rely on cognitive fallacies.

Each theory commits the oversimplification fallacy: they explain a complex phenomenon with a simpler explanation than is warranted. As their names suggest, deliberate practice, grit and mindset theories largely attribute differences in achievement to a single, primary factor within the individual’s control. However, multiple factors, including highly heritable traits (for example, general cognitive abilities, person-ality traits or physical characteristics), social influences (for example, financial resources or level of discrimination) and their interactions predict achievement.

The oversimplification fallacy maintains the popularity of these theories. Simplified messages are more easily understood and remem-bered than complex, nuanced messages; simple, pithy messages are also more likely to be repeated, increasing beliefs that the pithy message is true.

Each theory also falls prey to the bootstrap fallacy — the idea that prosperity and success are achieved through personal initiative and effort. The bootstrap fallacy is a type of oversimplification fallacy that focuses on the role of self-determinism in achieving success. Achievement theories reinforce the bootstrap fallacy by suggesting that success can be attained through effortful practice (or factors that lead to effortful practice).

The bootstrap fallacy lends itself to stories of effortful struggle that lead to eventual triumph. In Western societies, such narratives follow a common story format thought to be more appealing than stories of success without effort or stories ending in failure10. As a result, stories of effortful struggle followed by success might be more likely to come to mind, influencing personal, parenting and policy decisions.

Finally, each theory plays into the fundamental attribution error — the tendency to overemphasize dispositional-based explanations of behaviour. Popular theories of achievement focus on indivi duals’ self-determination and only a narrow scope of environmental factors

[717]

(such as classrooms and parenting approaches) that are assumed to influence self-determinism. However, the theories discount many large- scale environmental factors that contribute to achievement, such as societal structures that afford opportunities to some individuals while imposing barriers on others.

The fundamental attribution error of self-determination reso-nates with the self-help industry, creating a feedback loop: theories of achievement appear in self-help books and talks, which generates public excitement about the theories, which in turn increases market demand for those theories. Research supporting theories of achieve-ment is included in new self-help media, whereas counterevidence is largely ignored, giving the impression that these theories are robust.

Policy Implications

...

Recognizing fallacies to promote strong theories

...

... Researchers should be wary of evidence presented in an appealing story format for which there are no associated empirical data...

Once again, it's interesting (and slightly jarring) to find the "deliberate practice" theory and the "bootstrap fallacy" grouped together. i.e. "Deliberate practice" could support the faux-progressive ideal that anyone can achieve anything, and/or it could support the faux-conservative ideal that if you don't achieve anything then it's your own fault. Is "oversimplification" really a "fallacy" in the true technical sense, or is it just exactly what it says it is?

Frank L. Schmidt
A General Theoretical Integrative Model of Individual Differences in Interests, Abilities, Personality Traits, and Academic and Occupational Achievement: A Commentary on Four Recent Articles
(2014)

[211]

At the intermediate level of specificity, the most widely accepted model for occupational interests is Holland’s (1985, 1996) model of six basic interest types: Realistic (e.g., police officer or carpenter), Investigative (e.g., scientist, researcher), Artistic (e.g., poet, actor), Social (e.g., social worker, elementary school teacher), Enterprising (e.g., business founder, entrepreneur), and Conventional (e.g., bookkeeper, administrative assistant). ...

Valla and Ceci (2011): Sex Differences
in STEM Interests and Abilities

Valla and Ceci critiqued the evidence in the literature supporting brain organization theory. This theory holds that developmental events during gestation... create sex differences in brain lateralization... Interestingly, they presented no evidence that any of these forms of spatial ability contribute to success in STEM areas over and above the effects of general mental ability (GMA; intelligence) or other abilities. I have also never been able to locate such evidence. ...

Valla and Ceci stated that some studies indicate that prenatal testosterone exposure may affect interests and preferences much more than it affects abilities:...

...evidence “suggests that the influence of sex differences due to prenatal testosterone exposure is not directly on ability, but emerges as a function of interest”...

... A much larger percentage of males are interested in inanimate things (i.e., physical phenomena) rather than people or other living things, and a much larger percentage of females are interested in people and other living beings rather than inanimate things. As shown in a major meta-analysis, this difference is quite large—almost 1 standard deviation... This difference in interests is much larger than the largest sex difference in the ability domain:...

Schmidt (2011): Sex Differences in
Technical Aptitude

... Technical aptitude is viewed as one of many possible indicator variables for GMA, along with verbal, quantitative, and other aptitude measures. There is considerable evidence that in groups in which there is no sex difference on other GMA indicator variables, there is a substantial sex difference favoring males on measures of technical aptitude. ...research evidence shows that it is GMA that predicts job performance and that, after properly controlling for GMA, the specific indicators of GMA make no additional contribution to job performance prediction. ... Based on a very large sample, this study found that technical aptitude does underpredict female GMA, as hypothesized. Another way of stating this finding is this: Technical aptitude tests used as indicator measures of GMA overstate the relative general intelligence level of males and understate that of females.

The Schmidt article presents a theory... ...that the ultimate cause of lower average female technical aptitude scores is not any initial aptitude or ability difference but rather a lifelong lower average female level of interest in technical areas. ...

[213]

... The Schmidt article does not postulate a neurological, gestational, or hormonal basis for this sex difference in interests, as Valla and Ceci did, but it does review the research evidence showing that it is difficult, if not impossible, to change interests. The intuitive feeling of many people is that interests are much easier to modify than abilities, but the research evidence does not support this intuition.

...

Von Stumm et al. (2011): General
Intellectual Curiosity

...the proclivity to seek knowledge in a wide variety of knowledge areas. The correlation between measures of interest in general knowledge acquisition such as Ackerman’s Typical Intellectual Engagement (TIE) scale... and GMA suggests that intelligence is one cause of TIE, but substantial variation remains after controlling for GMA, no matter how it is measured. So even among people with the same level of GMA, there are wide variations in the level of this broadest of interests. ...

Should TIE be viewed as a personality trait or as the broadest of all possible interests? This distinction is not an easy one and is of necessity somewhat arbitrary. ... The categorization of TIE as an interest rather than a personality trait stems from the concept of a continuum of specificity of interests ranging from the most narrow and specific to the most general. ... As one moves along this continuum of interests, one eventually arrives at the most general point, which is “interest in acquisition of knowledge about almost everything.” At each point on the continuum, there is much variability among individuals,... This is just as true at the point of the broadest interest as it is at the preceding, less general points.

... The main focus of the von Stumm et al. article is on the relative causal impacts of GMA, Conscientiousness, and TIE on academic performance. ... The model that is found to provide the best fit to the data and to plausible theoretical assumptions is one in which GMA, Conscientiousness, and TIE are all direct causes of academic performance. ...

What makes their findings important is the broad and general nature of the dependent variable of academic

[214]

performance. ... What this finding shows is that the broadest of all possible interests has a causal impact on the broadest of all measures of academic performance or learning. This appears to be a strong test of the real world relevance of a very broad interest measure.

It occurs to me after reading this far: is so-called ambition something that could be codified and measured along with the rest of these characteristics? By ambition I mean "money." As in Richard Florida's finding of his Creative Class that "you can't attract the best with money."

I would be very interested in knowing the range of ambition within interest types as well as between/among them.

The Nye, Su, Rounds, and Drasgow
(2012) Article: Holland Interests
and Academic and Occupational
Achievement

... The ultimate conclusion from their meta-analysis is that interest in specific occupation types predicts job performance and tenure in those occupations and predicts academic performance and persistence in areas of study related to those occupations. Further, they show that an index of congruence (similarity) between people’s strongest interests and the extent to which their academic or work environment reflects and supports these interests predicts academic and work performance and persistence better than do the simple interest scale scores.

So what if people persist all the way from areas of study to occupations and that are in- congruent and then yet further from there? Any chance we could locate and study the grinders that Gladwell once claimed don't exist?

A Proposed Integrative Theoretical
Model

...this theory combines and integrates not only the contents of, and literature cited by, [the aforementioned studies]...but also: (a) the Ackerman (1999) findings showing a positive correlation between both Introversion and TIE and acquisition of general knowledge over time, (b) Cattell’s investment theory of intelligence with its constructs of fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence , (c) recent research showing that crystallized

[215]

intelligence is a much better predictor of real world performances and achievement than fluid intelligence , and (d) Goldberg’s (2005) neuroscience based research and theory explaining how people maintain high levels of intellectual and occupational performance long past ages at which fluid mental ability has declined to relatively low levels. ...

Introversion, TIE, and acquisition of
general knowledge

In a large study of adults, Ackerman and his associates...presented evidence that Introversion was positively correlated with TIE (or, alternatively, that Extroversion was negatively correlated with TIE). ... To state this dichotomously, introverts and high TIE people acquire a higher level of generic knowledge over time than do extroverts and low TIE people, possibly because they spend more time reading, thinking, and reflecting, and spend less time in social interactions. ...in the [present] model TIE is a direct cause of crystallized intelligence whereas Introversion is an indirect cause, with its effect being mediated through TIE.

... There is no evidence of a sex difference in TIE, and the Roznowski (1987) study... ...found that the general level of knowledge acquisition over time is the same for males and females, albeit the distribution of acquisition across knowledge categories is different between the sexes.

Fluid and crystallized intelligence

...crystallized intelligence which is defined in Cattell’s investment theory as acquired knowledge and skills.

Well okay, what's so wrong with calling this acquired knowledge and skills rather than fill-in-the-blank-ence? But sure, the task for each one of us is to (1) get our fluid flowing, and then (2) crystallize little phenomenal pieces into a mosaic of academic and occupational performance . In fact this is what I am doing right now.

... Cattell's theory states that each individual has an initial level of fluid intelligence (thought to be genetically and neurologically based), and people “invest” their fluid ability in the development of a wide variety of knowledge, skills, and aptitudes, with these investments being guided by their interests, both specific and general. ... Ackerman...presents evidence that three of the six Holland interest types contribute to generic knowledge acquisition: Investigative, Realistic, and Artistic interest areas.

Two outta three ain't bad!!

Sex differences in interests

...specific interests—at least some of them—are influenced in the case of males by prenatal hormonal conditioning (exposure to testosterone),... In particular,...toward interest in inanimate things (i.e. physical phenomena)...

Cautiously (but also recklessly), I would bring the grand relativization of standpoint into this issue and ask: do we have to know for sure that something is animate or inanimate in order for all of this to take hold. Or (shuddering) may we sometimes only think we know but in fact be very wrong in our conviction?

Art generally and music specifically seem to present this problem.

I would go even further (more recklessly) and speculate that what both Engels ca. 1890 (re: political philosophy) and Macdonald et al ca. 1955 (re: art criticism) refer to as "idealism," this idealism is actually (or at least partially made up of) a form of anthropomorphism as touched upon by the eco-pragmatists recently logged in the lit imp thread.

[216]

...

Academic and Occupational
Achievement

... Typically, fluid intelligence measures add little or nothing to prediction of either academic or job performance beyond the validity of crystallized intelligence measures. This finding supports the conclusion that acquired knowledge and mental skills are superior to supposed measures of initial innate mental endowment in determining real world performances and, more broadly, occupational success in life.

The other two variables exerting causal effects on adult academic and occupational performance are the personality trait of Conscientiousness and specific interests. ...Nye et al. (2012)... showed that this effect is strongest when the individual’s strongest interests are matched with a work or academic environment supportive of those interests. ... The von Strum et al. article demonstrates that Conscientiousness contributes to academic success, controlling for the effects of intelligence and TIE. ...

Finally,... Goldberg... ...was struck by the massive research evidence that fluid intelligence, considered to be the ability basis for learning in general, declines over time as the individual ages and has declined fairly substantially by the time people enter their 50s. At the same time he noted the evidence that many, if not most, people achieve their most important intellectual and occupational contributions after age 50 and often later. He set out to explain this apparent contradiction. His research on skilled mental performances of people 50 and older supported the conclusion that these achievements in middle age and later are explained by the use of templates, mental strategies, or decision rules or patterns that were built up and stored gradually over time; that is, these achievements are made possible by use of accumulated crystallized intelligence skills that had originally required fluid mental ability for their acquisition but now operate independently of current levels of fluid intelligence. The story in his theory is one of using fluid intelligence over a lifetime to build up skills, knowledge, and problem-solving strategies based on pattern recognition that constitute expertise that can be successfully employed well into older ages and long after fluid intelligence had declined markedly. ...

The Present Theoretical Integration

This theory...could perhaps be criticized on grounds that it is not sufficiently parsimonious. But theoretical parsimony may have its limits when the subject is as complex as the behavior and performance of humans. ...

... The present model intentionally considers only the case of normal male levels of prenatal exposure to testosterone. It is possible that extreme levels of prenatal exposure produce not only an extreme orientation of interests away from people and other living things and toward inanimate objects and phenomena, but also the kind of extreme introversion seen in autistics. It is possible that subclinically “autistic” individuals tend to gravitate toward the STEM fields. These ideas suggest a possible way in which the model might be extended. ... this

[217]

model postulates that introversion is a cause of TIE. Another possibility is that TIE is a cause of introversion. However, personality traits emerge and congeal at a young age..., whereas TIE becomes apparent only somewhat later,... So for that reason, there is probably a stronger case for introversion being a cause of TIE. ...

In the model, no variables are postulated as causes or precursors of fluid intelligence and Conscientiousness. However, these variables do have causes. Studies in behavior genetics have shown that both personality traits and mental abilities (including fluid intelligence) are strongly genetically influenced... ...this is also true of vocational interests and attitudes toward work. ... What about the role of the individual’s experience? It turns out that experience itself is genetically influenced, because people tend to create their own environments and experiences based on proclivities and propensities that are genetically influenced... In the model presented here, both TIE and specific interests are traits that lead people to create the experiences that shape the amount and type of crystallized intelligence the individual attains. So there is a role in the model for experience.

Summary

...

Ullén, F., Mosing, M., Holm, L., Eriksson, H., Madison, G. (2014)
Psychometric properties and heritability of a new online test for musicality, the Swedish Musical Discrimination Test
(2014)

[87]

1. Introduction

...within musicality testing there are two strong traditions, which differ in various characteristics. These are the ‘atomistic’ tradition of Seashore and the ‘omnibus’ approach of Wing...

The atomistic approach is based on the assumption that musicality is made up of several relatively narrow and distinct musical abilities. This leads to an expectation of statistical independence...or at least low intercorrelations. ...the idea of independence of musically relevant perceptual abilities [is "to some degree support(ed)," however], individual differences are... also influenced by more general factors. In fact, auditory discrimination tasks positively correlate with a broad range of non-musical cognitive tasks and psychometric modelling shows that general intelligence (g) is an important factor underlying the positive covariation between different ‘atomistic’ tests of musical discrimination...

In contrast, in the omnibus approach to musicality testing, musicality is considered a general high-level ability. Tests

[88]

developed within this tradition are less concerned with characterising components of musicality but rather tend to use a holistic approach... Typical test items may involve quality judgments of musical performances or the production of musically meaningful responses to stimuli...

Uh-oh, that sounds like...music appreciation.

...the omnibus tests typically are aimed at practicing musicians, while the atomist tests can be used for a wider range of purposes. It should be pointed out that there are musicality tests that do not easily fit into either of these main traditions as they focus on musical engagement, motivation and interests... e.g. the Music Use Questionnaire...

Here, a new test of musicality...is presented... ...the test... continues the ‘atomistic’ tradition...

2. Methods

...

[90]

...

3. Results

[91]

...

3.2. Genetic Modelling

Preliminary analyses showed that sex had a small mean effect on Pitch... with a slightly lower mean for females... than for males... Age showed a significant mean effect on Rhythm... and Pitch ... with decreased discrimination skills with increased age. ... influences. Pitch... showed significant sex differences suggesting potential (though not significantly) higher heritability in females (30%) than in males (12% – non-significant) with additional shared environmental influences in males (38%) as opposed to only 19% in females (non-significant). ...

4. Discussion

...

[92]

...

4.3. Twin modelling

The music abilities showed moderate genetic influences with slightly lower estimates (though non-significant) in males compared to females. In males only, there was an additional significant shared-environmental influence on Pitch, suggesting potential differences in the underlying etiology in music skills between sexes. ...

Miriam A. Mosing and Fredrik Ullén
Genetic influences on musical specialization: a twin study on choice of instrument and music genre
(2018)

[5]

Discussion

... Analyses of within-pair similarity (concordance) showed that musically active MZ twin pairs were more concordant than DZ pairs for choice of musical genre as well as instrument. The latter effect was seen for both instrument categories and specific instruments. The findings give a strong indication that genes indeed influence these aspects of specialization among musically active individuals, and are in line with the broader literature showing genetic influences on individual variability in other music-related traits... Notably, genetic influences were indicated for both piano playing and singing, although the decision to play the piano seems likely to be influenced by whether a piano is present in the shared environment of the twins, while—in contrast—singing requires no extra equipment and is in principle accessible to everyone.

Dennis Drayna, Ani Manichaikul, Marlies de Lange, Harold Snieder, Tim Spector
Genetic Correlates of Musical Pitch Recognition in Humans
(2001)

[1969 (abstract)]

We used a twin study to investigate the genetic and environmental contributions to differences in musical pitch perception abilities in humans. We administered a Distorted Tunes Test (DTT), which requires subjects to judge whether simple popular melodies contain notes with incorrect pitch, to 136 monozygotic twin pairs and 148 dizygotic twin pairs. The correlation of DTT scores between twins was estimated at 0.67 for monozygotic pairs and 0.44 for dizygotic pairs. Genetic model-fitting techniques supported an additive genetic model, with heritability estimated at 0.71 to 0.80, depending on how subjects were categorized, and with no effect of shared environment. DTT scores were only weakly correlated with measures of peripheral hearing. This suggests that variation in musical pitch recognition is primarily due to highly heritable differences in auditory functions not tested by conventional audiologic methods.

...

Linking Genetic and Cultural Evolution.

...

... Genome-wide association studies (GWAS)... ...studies of behavioral phenotypes such as IQ, educational attainment, and life history should be interpreted with care . ...“Studies of genetic analyses of behavioural phenotypes have been prone to misinterpretation, such as characterizing identified associated variants as ‘genes for education.’ Such characterization is not correct for many reasons: Educational attainment is primarily determined by environmental factors” . Statistical relationships between genetic variants and behaviors need not be causal because assortative mating, spatial autocorrelation, and a shared environment can influence such relationships . Twin studies of tobacco smoking point to interacting roles of genetics, environment, and assortative mating in the initiation and continuance of smoking . ...

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the example of educational attainment is unsatisfying and only half-hopeful. "Educational attainment" is not "intelligence." "Educational attainment" has never had less to do with "intelligence" or with any other positive quality than it does in the present environment . The engineering of this cultural environment along precisely these lines has been at best a wash. At worst, as is only now beginning to be said out loud, it has actually worked against its own Progressive aims.

I don't mean to suggest that "educational attainment" ought to be reserved only for the "intelligent" among us. I mean only to heartily echo the authors here: "attainment" is the right word, and it's primarily determined by environmental factors . But let's really think about the wording here! This passage sums up the folly of credentialism beautifully.

The opportunity to become a product of this particular environment is exactly the opportunity advertised above.

Nonrandom Assortment and Biased Transmission

assorting can affect not just mate choice but many types of cultural interactions, termed “assortative meeting” . Empirical work supports this theoretical finding; for example, beneficial health behaviors spread more readily through a social network when individuals’ social contacts were more similar to themselves. ...

In addition to choosing their mates nonrandomly, individuals can also choose their cultural role models; these cultural transmission biases affect the relationship between a trait’s frequency in the population and its likelihood of transmission (Fig. 3). For example, conformity bias is an exaggerated preference for the cultural variant practiced by the majority of the population, which can lead to an increasingly large majority over time (85, 86). Alternatively, individuals might preferentially seek out novel cultural traits, termed rarity bias or novelty bias (30). These frequency-dependent biases can lead to patterns of cultural diffusion in which the prevalence of a cultural trait can change dramatically over short timescales, producing logistic growth (“S-shaped” curves) of trait frequency over time (87, 88). Examples of cultural traits that are likely to exhibit frequency-dependent transmission are fashion trends (89), career choices (12), and baby names (90). Conformist transmission is likely to dominate when the environment is relatively stable and common cultural traits are well adapted to that environment (86, 91). Other types of transmission biases reflect not how common a trait is in a population, but the characteristics of the people who have the trait. In the case of prestige bias, individuals attempt to acquire cultural traits that are perceived to be high quality by selectively learning from those individuals with high social rank (92). For example, in an experimental test, children were much more likely to choose an adult cultural role model if they had observed bystanders attending to the potential model rather than ignoring him or her (93); thus, even at a very early age, humans can assess such characteristics as prestige or social standing. Individuals can also use observations of success associated with a cultural trait, such as a fruitful hunt with a certain tool, to develop a preference for cultural role models that are demonstrably successful (30). This bias has been demonstrated experimentally (94, 95); for example, when individuals participated in simulated hunting with virtual arrowheads and then modified their arrowheads either by trial and error or imitation, copying successful individuals gave significantly better results than trial and error (94).

Models of Culture and Human Ecology

... Attempting to answer the question of what are the extensions of human biology through culture leads to a striking conclusion: There are few aspects of human biology that have not been shaped by our culture. ...

Human Niche Construction. ... Because cultural change has the potential to occur faster than genetic adaptation, dynamics of niche construction that are driven by cultural traits play a prominent role in human evolution;...

...

Demography and Cultural Evolution

...

Discussion

Miriam A. Mosing, , Karin J.H. Verweij, , Guy Madison, , Nancy L. Pedersen, Brendan P. Zietsch, , Fredrik Ullén
Did sexual selection shape human music? Testing predictions from the sexual selection hypothesis of music evolution using a large genetically informative sample of over 10,000 twins
(2015)

A B S T R A C T

Although music is a universal feature of human culture, little is known about its origins and functions. A prominent theory of music evolution is the sexual selection hypothesis, which proposes that music evolved as a signal of genetic quality to potential mates. The sexual selection hypothesis offers several empirically testable predictions. ... We tested these predictions in a large genetically informative sample of 10,975 Swedish twin individuals aged between 27 and 54 years... Contrary to predictions, the majority of phenotypic associations between musical ability and music achievement with mating success were nonsignificant or significant in the other direction, with those with greater musical ability scoring lower on the measures of mating success. Genetic correlations between these measures were also nonsignificant. Most correlations of musical aptitude and music achievement with genetic quality measures were significant, including correlations with general intelligence, simple reaction time, and, in females, height (but only for aptitude). However, only the correlation between musical aptitude and general intelligence in men was significantly driven by overlapping genetic influences. Our findings provide little support for a role of sexual selection in the evolution of musical ability. ...

1. Introduction

...

1.2. Sexual selection theory

... The sexual selection theory of music evolution proposes that genetic mutations accumulated over many generations (i.e. mutation load) have deleterious downstream effects on general functioning , and that cognitive ability is an especially sensitive indicator of mutation load because brain function depends on a very large proportion of the genome and will thus be affected by a large proportion of random mutations . As such, cognitive ability has been hypothesized to be a fundamental indicator of good genes . However, variation in cognitive ability (as measured by intelligence tests) is not directly observable, but can only be indirectly communicated through exhibition of complex behavior, such as music production . As such, the theory proposes that musical production has been used to advertize such traits and humans have evolved to utilize the information such display conveys about the performer . Accordingly, musicality would be an indicator of high genetic quality promising indirect benefits of mate choice in the form of genetic benefits to the offspring. ...

...

Discussion

...

...our finding that higher musical ability does not lead to increased sexual success are also compatible with the idea that musicality may not be a direct target of selection, but rather may be co-opted from mechanisms that evolved for other functions that were more directly selected for... This would be in line with the finding that most if not all brain areas involved in music serve other purposes as well...

Mathias Benedek, Barbara Borovnjak, Aljoscha C. Neubauer, Silke Kruse-Weber
Creativity and personality in classical, jazz and folk musicians
(####)

[118]

...

Materials and Methods

...

2.2.2. Creativity assessment

Creative cognitive potential in the verbal domain was assessed with four divergent thinking tasks taken from a well-known German creativity test (Verbaler-Kreativitätstest; VKT; Schoppe, 1975). The tasks included two alternate uses tasks asking participants to generate different creative uses for a ‘‘tin can’’ and a ‘‘simple string’’, and two instances tasks which asked to generate many things that could be used ‘‘for faster locomotion’’ or that are ‘‘bendable’’. In all tasks, participants were instructed to find as many and as creative ideas as possible within the given time (120s, or 90s for the alternate uses and the instances task, respectively). The performance in the divergent thinking tasks was scored for ideational fluency (i.e., number of ideas), and ideational creativity. For the scoring of ideational creativity we created lists of pooled, alphabetically sorted, non-redundant responses for each task. Four experienced raters rated each idea for creativity on a four-point scale (‘‘0, uncreative’’, ‘‘1, somewhat creative’’, ‘‘2, fairly creative’’, and ‘‘3, very creative’’). We then computed a top-3 creativity score by averaging the creativity ratings of the three top-most creative ideas within each task...

Pretty sure I would score on the low end of these sorts of tests. Not sure why. There is a story about a cousin of mine being asked (I can't remember why) to name a few vegetables that start with r-. She had worked in and for restaurants for a long time and is married to a chef, so the r-veggies came fast and furious. I remember thinking as the story was being told that none of her answers would have occurred to me, even though I am both an inveterate wrangler of vegetables and an inveterate wordsmith.

... Additionally, creative potential in the figural domain was assessed with a picture completion task taken from the imagination subscales of the Berliner-Intelligenz-Test (Jäger, Süß, & Beauducel, 1997). Participants were shown a series of abstract lines which had to be completed in an original way to form meaningful objects. This task was scored for ideational fluency following the instructions of the test manual.

I would probably score higher on this part.

Besides creative potential, we also assessed real-life creative activities and achievements of the students using the inventory of creative activities and achievements...

Well yeah, just to be safe, right?

[119]

...

3. Results

...

3.1. Genre-related differences in general musical activities

Jazz musicians played significantly more concerts per semester than classical musicians...and folk musicians... On the other hand, jazz musicians participated in a lower number of music competitions... Finally, folk musicians published a significantly higher number of works than classical musicians...

Just couldn't let this go without including it here. Published?? Then they're not folk musicians!

...

3.3. Genre-related differences in personality

Analyses of group differences in personality structure revealed a significant effect for extraversion...and an effect by trend for openness..., but not effects for neuroticism, agreeableness, or conscientiousness... Specifically, folk musicians were found to be more extraverted than classical musicians...and jazz musicians... Classical musicians tend to be less open to new experiences than jazz musicians and folk musicians... The music genre groups did, however, not differ in schizotypy... No further significant group differences were observed in the motivational measures of this study, including all sub-facets of error orientation and perfectionism, and indicators of achievement motivation, learning motivation and rumination.

4. Discussion

...

[120]

...

... As expected, Jazz musicians showed higher divergent thinking ability (i.e., creative cognitive potential) in terms of ideational creativity than classical and folk musicians. ... Interestingly, Fink and Woschnjak (2011) reported a similar finding from the domain of dance. They found that modern/contemporary dancers, who are often required to improvise on stage, showed higher creative potential than ballet dancers... Of course, one can only speculate about the causality in the relationship between divergent thinking and improvisation abilities: Is high divergent thinking ability a precondition for becoming a good jazz musician, or does continuous improvisation training implicitly increase divergent thinking ability? There is evidence in support of both perspectives. ...

...

We also observed differences in personality between musicians of different genres of music. First of all, folk musicians are more extraverted than classical and jazz musicians. ... We also observed a weak group effect for openness suggesting that jazz and folk musicians are more open to new experiences than classical musicians. ...

Enrico R. Crema, Anne Kandler & Stephen Shennan
Revealing patterns of cultural transmission from frequency data: equilibrium and non-equilibrium assumptions
(2016)

[1]

...

...most of the research mentioned above assumes that the cultural system considered is at equilibrium, expressed by a stationary instantaneous frequency distribution of the variants. The fact that an equilibrium has been reached implies that the parameters affecting the dynamic of the system have been constant for a sufficiently long period of time. However, this might not be a realistic assumption for cultural studies.

[2]

...

Materials

The data set consists of over 5800 pottery vessels recovered from a small group of settlements of the first farmers in Central Europe in the valley of the Merzbach stream in western Germany. ... the settlement and ceramic sequence covers nearly five centuries, from ca. 5300 to 4850 cal B.C. ... The ceramic vessels take the form of deep bowls whose decoration is highly distinctive and stylised, comprising a variety of distinct but clearly related band-types that were defined by the original excavation team.

...

The Merzbach dataset has already been been subject of archaeological analyses with the conclusions that the observed changes in frequency are indicative of anti-conformity and unbiased transmission. ... Neutral evolution assumes that the probability of producing a particular motif in the next time step is proportional to the relative frequency of this motif in the population (i.e. in the assemblage) and that novel motifs are introduced with a constant probability. They [Shennan and Wilkinson] used different estimates of effective population size and innovation rate, and showed that in general there was a higher diversity than the model expectation, a result that led them to suggest the presence of an anti-conformist transmission bias... Bentley and Shennan... ...found a good fit between the data and the hypothesis of unbiased transmission,... Both studies use summary statistics to evaluate the correspondence between theory and data and assume that the cultural system producing the different frequency distributions is at equilibrium. Nevertheless they generate different inferences regarding the underlying mechanism of cultural transmission. ...

Methods

...

[5]

...

Statistical Inference.  We stress that analyses of sparse data such as those typically found in historical case-studies are likely to reveal the problem of equifinality: a number of underlying cultural processes might be able to produce the same population-level patterns. ... ...even in these situations inference frameworks such as the one described here are instructive as they still narrow down the pool of potential cultural hypotheses.

...

[7]

Discussion

...

[9]

...

To conclude, our attempt at inferring patterns of cultural transmission in the Merzbach assemblage has revealed a cultural system that is unlikely to be in equilibrium conditions. Instead our approach hints at the possibility of shifts between anti-conformist and conformist modes of social learning. While the inference framework developed in this paper requires further testing with simulated data in controlled conditions, we argue that the challenge posed by archaeological case studies can contribute to methodological and theoretical advances in the field of cultural evolutionary studies.

Overall this paper is highly technical and difficult for a layperson to understand. This last part seems to be the gist, and it is in this capacity that it was mentioned by Creanza et al.

I can at least say that this seems to be the kind of thing that is required of a rigorous "socio-determinism" in the arts, this as opposed to the merely fanciful and speculative kind to which we are so often treated.

Charles Efferson, Rafael Lalive, Peter J. Richersond, Richard McElreath, Mark Lubell
Conformists and mavericks: the empirics of frequency-dependent cultural transmission
(2008)

[56]

1. Introduction

... As formally defined (Boyd & Richerson, 1982, 1985), conformity is based on the following proposition. In a simple case with two behaviors R and B, where r_t is the frequency of R in the population, conformity means that, in the near future, an individual exhibits behavior R with a probability less than r_t if r_t<1/2, but with a probability greater than r_t if r_t>1/2. In other words, individuals do not simply follow the majority; rather, they show a disproportionate tendency to follow the majority. They overrespond, so to speak, to frequency information. This feature of conformity is crucial because,

[57]

as we show below, it homogenizes behavior within social groups. ...

...

... To demonstrate conformity as a force that homogenizes behavior within social groups, it is not enough to show simply that individuals adopt common behaviors. Researchers must also show that this inclination is disproportionate...

... Theoretically, conformity can be a valuable way to make good decisions in temporally and spatially variable environments... Imagine the R and B are two existing technologies. ... Assume that individuals experiment from time to time and learn individually as a result, and this produces a slight bias toward the optimal technology. ...conformity exaggerates such a bias by filtering out a lot of the noise at the individual level. ... By itself, however, conformity implies nothing about the optimality of individual decisions.

In addition to decision making, conformity has the interesting theoretical property that it reduces behavioral variation within populations while potentially increasing variation among populations. ...

2. How Conformity Works

...

[58]

... Conformity works by identifying the optimum disproportionately if other forces...bias choices toward the optimum. It does not work, in the sense that it disproportionately identifies the suboptimal technology, if other forces bias choices toward the suboptimum. Moreover, when the social group gets larger, the amount of information embedded in the group increases, and the nonlinearity intrinsic to conformity becomes more extreme.

3. The empirics of frequency dependence

...conformity should not be defined simply as any positive social influence. Such an approach neglects important distinctions between different types of frequency dependence,...

...

[61]

5. Results and Discussion

...

[63]

...our data suggest a meaningful distinction between those who conform and those who largely ignore information about behavioral frequencies. Nonetheless, substantial individual variation also exists within each of these two generic groups of players. ... Also unclear is the extent to which players might adjust their use of frequency-dependent social information according to its value. ... Our results show that some individuals do not conform even when doing so would be very much in their own interests. This conclusion is in contrast to studies such as those of Asch...

This is all that I can parse from this paper, which is very interesting but too technical for the e-arriviste.

Joe Henrich and Robert Boyd
The Evolution of Conformist Transmission and the Emergence of Between-Group Differences
(1998)

[215 (abstract)]

Unlike other animal species, much of the variation among human groups is cultural: genetically similar people living in similar environments exhibit strikingly different patterns of behavior because they have different, culturally acquired beliefs and values. ... Boyd and Richerson showed that a tendency to acquire the most common behavior exhibited in a society was adaptive in a simple model... Here, we study the evolution of such “conformist transmission” in a more general model... The analysis of this model indicates that conformist transmission is favored under a very broad range of conditions, broader in fact than the range of conditions that favor a substantial reliance on social learning. ...

---

...

[216]

...there has been little effort to explain the existence of cultural variation between groups in terms that are consistent with the assumption that the psychological mechanisms that create and maintain such variation are evolved adaptations. ...

...most anthropologists are convinced that these factors ["differences in the physical or biological environment or in technology"] are not sufficient to explain most cultural differences. History, linguistic studies, and the ethnographic record furnish evidence that groups possessing entirely different religious systems, social structures, and domestic relations may inhabit similar environments and possess similar technologies. ...

... As Barth (1969) points out, cultural “boundaries persist despite the flow of personnel across them.” ...

CULTURAL EVOLUTION AS A PROBLEM IN
POPULATION DYNAMICS

...

...why we distinguish cultural transmission from other forms of learning. In all forms of phenotypic plasticity, organisms modify their behavior based on cues available from their environment. ... The psychological mechanisms that determine which environmental cues are salient, and how organisms respond to these cues, can often be understood as adaptations. ... In many species, the use of social cues can lead to the development of local "traditions"...; however, there is no evidence that nonhuman traditions change cumulatively over time or allow the development of behaviors that individuals could not learn on their own. In contrast... cultural transmission in humans arises because people are able to acquire novel behaviors, which they could not learn on their own, by observing or being taught by others. In other animals, the ability to acquire novel behaviors by observational learning is absent,... limited to a narrow range of behav-

[218]

iors,..., or very rudimentary,...

...

... Because it is highly unlikely that biological evolution produced a generalized problem-solving capacity..., it makes sense to propose a complex of learning mechanisms or “transmission biases” that allow humans to effectively and efficiently ac-

[219]

quire beliefs, ideas, and behaviors... These learning mechanisms provide “rules of thumb” that bias humans towards acquiring certain beliefs and behaviors without exhaustively examining and processing the immense amount of available social and environmental information.

...

The unbiased transmission (or faithful imitation) of beliefs and values from one generation to the next is not sufficient to maintain cultural variation or cultural boundaries unless cultures are perfectly isolated from each other. When transmission is unbiased, any amount of cultural mixing will rapidly obliterate cultural differences between groups. ...

...

[220]

...

MODELING THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIAL LEARNING
AND CONFORMIST TRANSMISSION

We assume that the central adaptive problem facing individuals is how to best use environmental cues to choose behavior when the environment changes in space and time. For the purpose of modeling this situation, we have divided environmental cues into two kinds: nonsocial and social. Nonsocial cues predict the current environmental state, but these cues are imperfect. Relying on the nonsocial cues alone will allow individuals to do better than random, but will sometimes lead to errors.

[221]

Individuals also can observe the behavior of other individuals in the population, and to the extent that individuals in the population are doing better than random, their behavior also provides a cue about the best behavior in the current local environment. The question is: How should psychology evolve to best use these two sources of information? It is important to keep in mind that the usefulness of social cues depends on how people have utilized both social and nonsocial information in the past; therefore, this question cannot be answered without taking into account how evolving psychology shapes observable behavior in the population over time.

So, basically we cheat by snatching looks at the other examinee's papers? As opposed to merely putting our own inner resources together with what meager nonsocial cues are available?

If art is an instance of "inventing what we need" and not merely a "decadent" sideshow, then the same applies here as well. And even when art (and society!) have become decadent, it's not so easy to argue that this was not what people needed in that moment. Perhaps they were/are merely...responding to their environment as they've been conditioned!

The model [in the present study] is divided into four stages: cultural transmission... , individual learning, migration, and natural selection. First, individuals acquire their initial behavior by imitating members of the previous generation. Genetic variation among individuals affects both the extent to which individuals rely on social learning and the degree of conformism in that social learning. ...

Next, all individuals try to learn the best behavior for the current environment. Each individual acquires information from the environment that allows her to infer which trait is currently adaptive. ... Because environmental information is imperfect, individual learning does not always produce the correct behavior for the current environment. ...

[222]

...

...we assume that in order to avoid errors, individuals adopt a particular behavior only if the probability that it is correct is sufficiently better than its alternative, meaning these individuals have acquired sufficiently accurate environmental information through trial-and-error learning, for example, to allow them to select the adaptive behavior with an acceptable degree of certainty. When environmental cues are not of sufficiently high quality, individuals imitate. Of course, raising the standards of evidence will also cause more trials to be indecisive... , and more individuals will rely on imitation. Thus, there is a tradeoff: selection can increase the accuracy of individual learning, but only by also increasing the probability that environmental cues will be indecisive and thereby causing individuals to increase their reliance on imitation.

...

[224]

...

RESULTS

By systematically varying ρ, the accuracy of environmental information, m, the migration rate, ε, the degree of environmental stability, and n, the number of subpopulations, we have learned several important things about the evolution of social learning and conformist transmission. First, the degree of reliance on social learning (L) depends on strongly on the accuracy of environmental information (ρ) and the frequency of environmental fluctuations (1 - ε). ... Second, the presence of conformist transmission effectively increases the accuracy of social learning in most situations and consequently facilitates a greater reliance on social learning.

...

[225]

...

Selection Favors Conformist Transmission as Long as
Environments do not Change too Rapidly

...

[226]

...

Greater Rates of Environmental Change Favor Less Reliance
on Social Learning

...

Interestingly, even when most individuals learn on their own and only a few imitate... , conformist transmission remains adaptive and evolves to 80% of its maximum value. When one imitates, even in an environment that shifts 40% of the time, preferentially copying the most frequent behavior remains advantageous. Consequently, it is the evolution of social learning, and not the evolution of the conformist effect, that demands more stable environments. More stable environments favor both the alleles for a heavy reliance on social learning and the alleles for strong conformist transmission.

Conformist Transmission Increases the Reliance on
Social Learning

...

Selection Favors Strong Conformist Transmission Unless
Individual Learning is Very Error Prone or Highly Accurate

...

[228]

...

Conformist Transmission is Favored for a Wide Range of
Migration Rates

...

[229]

...

Varying the Number of Subpopulations Has Little Effect on
the Model's Behavior

...

[230]

...

Although it is difficult to determine the strength of conformist transmission in the current human cognitive apparatus, most people would agree that humans learn many important beliefs, ideas, values, and behaviors from other individuals and not from the nonsocial environment. After thorough testing of this simulation, we can find no circumstance under which social learning evolves to a significant degree and conformist transmission does not, so long as there is at least a little migration. However, several circumstances show the evolution of a strong conformist tendency... , but produce only a very small degree of social learning...

WHY IS CONFORMIST TRANSMISSION IMPORTANT?

Conformist transmission accounts for the fact that there is “heritable” cultural variation among human groups. Humans live in cultural groups in which group members tend to believe similar things about the world and behave in similar ways. ...

[231]

... Conformist transmission generates a population-level process that creates and maintains group boundaries and cultural differences through time. ...

Competing Explanations For Within-Group Similarity And
Between-Group Differences

There are at least three other, competing—though not mutually exclusive—explanations for the existence of cultural variation at the group level, which we categorize as: (1) variation in the physical and biological environment, (2) different local optima, and (3) punishment. First, some scholars (Harris 1979; Hill and Hurtado 1996) deny that many of the important aspects of culture are socially transmitted and hence “heritable.” Instead they believe that most so-called “cultural” variation

[232]

results from phenotypic plasticity. For humans, this kind of behavioral plasticity is usually portrayed as variations in behavior in response to different environmental information.

Second, the same environmental problems may have multiple solutions, and, consequently, the specific histories of different cultures may have led to divergent evolutionary trajectories—different solutions for the same problem. This process can maintain similarities among individuals within groups and differences between groups because individuals who deviate from the common behaviors in some dimension are worse off, because their rare behavior does not complement those of the rest of the culture. In this way, cultural variation is maintained in much the same way that natural selection maintains many different kinds of eyes in the animal kingdom. Third, norms enforced by social sanctions or punishment can stabilize a very wide range of social behaviors, and if such norms affect a wide enough range of behavior, they may be responsible for heritable cultural variation.

... We argue that the first hypothesis can be rejected on empirical grounds. The other two hypotheses are cogent, but have different empirical entailments than the hypothesis that conformist transmission maintains cultural variation. ...

Hypothesis 1: Environmental variation. ... We do not believe that this hypothesis can explain the widespread existence of culturally distinct groups whose behavior differs in many important ways despite the fact that they inhabit very similar physical and ecological environments.

Reviewers of an earlier version of this article suggested that such cultural variation among groups is due to the historical patterns created when individuals responded opportunistically to the current distribution of behaviors expressed by other members of the group, and that by ignoring this historical dimension we have created a straw man. Although some authors (Alexander 1979: p. 77) have invoked this kind of argument as an explanation for human cultural variation, we do not think that such explanations are coherent or plausible. History is not a causal factor in explaining human behavior, but rather something to be explained, and we believe that any explicit, coherent explanation will necessarily incorporate a role for culturally transmitted information. If history is just the temporal working out of individual choices, then why is the “historical dimension” of human environments so impor-

[233]

tant to understanding the differences between human groups, but not so important in understanding the differences between chimpanzee groups? Although chimpanzees do have history and it does shape the behavior of social groups (De Waal 1982; Wrangham et al. 1994) it does not lead to the large-scale variation in space and time seen in humans.

The view that historical and cultural factors are unimportant also is implicit in the work of human behavioral ecologists (and others such as economists) who rely almost entirely on optimization models to predict human behavior. Although such models often provide a heuristic way to derive the steady-state outcomes of adaptive processes such as learning and natural selection, they are devoid of any historical dimension. The fact that some authors within these research traditions rely exclusively on optimization models suggests that they place little credence in historical or cultural explanations. ...

As for the cultural materialists, Marvin Harris (1979) is very clear about what primarily drives the development of social-cultural systems: technologies applied to ecosystems. ...this becomes the “principle of infrastructural determinism” (Harris 1979: 55–56). ... We address these explanations with two ethnographic examples, taken from numerous possibilities, which show that substantial cultural differences exist between societies that possess similar technologies and inhabit similar (or some times identical) environments.

...

[235]

Hypothesis 2: Multiple solutions to adaptive problems. Real-world environments probably result in complex fitness topographies containing a variety of peaks, valleys, chasms, and plateaus. Consequently, slight variations in initial conditions... can drive two quite similar populations toward increasingly divergent adaptive “peaks” or solutions... And, because many adaptive behavioral practices involve the accumulation and integration of many different traits, and the addition of each new behavioral component alters the conditions for subsequent additions, most changes or novel traits are likely to produce maladaptive effects once a local optimum is reached.

***that sounds a lot like mumford's "same high level"***

Jumping from one optimum to another becomes difficult, because it requires simultaneously altering a number of traits in just the right way... Normally, most adaptive cultural practices require a gradual accumulation of innovations, and consequently “peak-shifting” is rare...

...

[236]

...

Hypothesis 3: Third-party punishment. Scholars from economics, anthropology, and biology have suggested that third-party punishment (also called moralistic reciprocity) may account for the maintenance of group norms... and, consequently, the similarity within groups and the differences between groups. This hypothesis proposes that humans possess a reliably developing neural encoding that compels them both to punish individuals who violate group norms (common beliefs or practices) and punish individuals who do not punish norm violators—the punishment of nonpunishers. ...

... Some scholars... have suggested that all deviations from high-frequency behavior evoke “moralistic indignation” or negative reactions that may result in some sort of social sanction (which may be subtle). ...

...

[237]

CONCLUSIONs

...

JOSEPH HENRICH AND RICHARD McELREATH
The Evolution of Cultural Evolution
(2003)

[123]

... Humans, unlike other animals, are heavily reliant on social learning to acquire large and important portions of their behavioral repertoire. No evolved cognitive models, "evoked

[124]

culture," or generalized cost-benefit calculators delivered to these men [Burke and Wills] the knowledge of how to detoxify nardoo spores...

...

Throughout this paper we will use "cultural learning" and "cultural transmission/acquisition" to refer to the subset of social learning capacities that allow for cumulative cultural evolution. We use "culture" to refer to the information acquired by individuals via social learning. ...

...

WHY IS CULTURAL LEARNING
ADAPTIVE

...theorists have developed formal models to study how temporally and spatially changing environmental conditions affect the evolutionary trade-offs between capacities for individual learning..., social learning, and "hard-wired" behavioral responses. ... They show that social learning is favored throughout a large intermediate range of environmental fluctuation, especially when environments are highly autocorrelated. The intuition behind these results is that social learning allows organisms to respond more quickly to environmental changes than do hard-wired responses, but only by exploiting a body of adaptive knowledge that is stored in the learned behavioral repertoire of the population. ...

[125]

...

...with intermediate rates of change, on the order of tens or hundreds of generations, social learning mechanisms both outpace genetic adaptation and have sufficient time between environmental changes to accumulate a body of adaptive knowledge...

...this theoretical work suggests that both individual and social learning from [sic] an intertwined adaptive reponse to increasing amounts of environmental variability... First, there is new evidence that increases in brain size relative to body size are correlated with both social and individual learning abilities across species. In primates, brain size corrected for body size correlates most strongly with social learning abilities, but also with individual learning ("innovation") and tool use, all three of which are highly intercorrelated. ... Second, these data suggest that increases in brain size in the paleontological record have been partly driven by increases in social learning abilities. Right up to the present, the record shows that several mammalian lineages have undergone increases in brain size relative to body size. Finally, over the same period, ice-core data show increasing degrees of climatic variation: Over the last fourteen million years, which is the limit of the time depth of the data, increases in climatic variability are mirrored by increases in brain ratio. This combination of evidence...suggests that human cultural capacities may be a hypertrophied subset of a larger class of learning abilities that have evolved in many species.

...

... While social learners do very well when they are rare, they do poorly when they are common. Without any individual learners, social learners cannot track changes in the environment, and the first individual learner entering a group of social learners always has higher fitness than the others. This means that at equilibrium the mean fitness of the population as a whole is the same as that in a population of purely individual learners. Social learning alone does not increase adaptibility. ...

[126]

...

WHY ARE CAPACITIES FOR
CUMULATIVE CULTURAL TRANSMISSION
RARE?

Several of our colleagues are fond of the "Why not baboons?" stratagem:... We have seen many clever theories crumble before this interrogation. ...

While an increasing amount of field evidence suggests that other animals, particularly chimpanzees, may maintain traditions that result from social learning, there is little reason to believe that nonhuman social learning capacities can generate cumulative adaptation. ... Tomasello, Kruger, and Ratner suggested that true imitation, or observational learning...is necessary for cumulative cultural evolution. Other kinds of social learning may lead to traditions, but not to the accumulation of adaptive information. ...

[127]

...chimps possess modest true imitative capacities, but the complexity of the skills and technologies they can represent and the fidelity of their transmission is less than that of humans.

True imitation is probably not the whole story... Symbolic communication...allows for a great deal of cultural transmission without "observation" in the usual sense. For example, !Kung hunters knew a great deal of natural history, including the fact that porcupines are monogamous. ...Tomasello argues that true imitation, rooted in a genetically evolved capacity for Theory of Mind, generates both linguistic and non-linguistic forms of cultural evolution, and that linguistic symbols...have gradually accumulated, improved, and adapted through a cultural evolutionary process analogous to that observed in the domain of material culture...

...

...because cultural capacities are not favored when rare, we should not expect them to be widespread in nature. A population must traverse a fitness valley before the frequency of true imitation is high enough to make it individually advantageous. ...

...

WHAT COGNITIVE
MECHANISMS GUIDE CULTURAL
EVOLUTION?

...

[129]

...

...content biases and context biases. ... Content biases...exploit informative cues of an idea, belief, or behavior itself, and thereby influence the likelihood of imitation. ... In thinking about content biases, it is important to keep in mind a number of things. First, jury-rigged evolutionary products, like human minds, are likely to contain accidental byproducts and latent structures that create biases for fitness-neutral behaviors... Second, even content biases that arose because they led to the adoption of fitness-enhancing behavior in ancient environments may now promote the adoption of quite maladaptive practices. Third, content biases may be either reliably developing products of our species-shared genetic heritage or they may be culture specific. ...

Context biases, on the other hand, exploit features of potential models or the frequencies of alternative behaviors or strategies, rather than features of the alternatives themselves,... There is a great deal of adaptive information embodied in both who holds ideas and how common the ideas are. ...

Success and Prestige Bias

...

[130] ...natural selection may favor cognitive capacities that cause individuals to learn preferentially from more successful individuals. ...while the ability to rank individuals by foraging success is observed in nonhumans..., there is no evidence that individuals in these species acquire strategies from successful foragers. ...

...uncertainty about the payoffs and success of other individuals complicates success-biased learning. ...

...it is often very unclear which of an individual's many traits have led to success. ...humans may have evolved the propsensity to copy successful individuals across a wide range of cultural traits, only some of which may actually relate to the individuals' success. If information is costly, it turns out that this strategy will be favored by natural selection even though it may allow neutral and maladaptive traits to hitchhike along with adaptive cultural traits. ...

The evolution of a success bias may also be able to explain the formation of prestige hierarchies. ...social learners will need to compete for access to the most skilled individuals. This creates a new selection pressure on success-based learners to pay deference to those they assess as highly skilled...

...

Conformist Bias

...

... Because these behaviors [of the many] implicitly contain the effects of each individual's experience and learning efforts, conformist transmission can be the best route to adaptation in information-poor environments. ...

[131]

...

IF CULTURAL VARIANTS DO
NOT REPLICATE LIKE GENES,
CAN CULTURE EVOLVE?

... Dawkins...described what he saw to be the necessary characteristics of any replicating entity: longevity, fecundity, and fidelity. The structure of this argument has been used to support the analogy between genetic and cultural (or "memetic") evolution:... Some..., however, have severely criticized the power of this analogy, arguing that cultural ideas are rarely if ever replicated during social learning and that culture is substantially transformed by human psychology so that ideas are rarely transmitted intact... For these reasons, they argue, cultural variants...have little fidelity and so cannot evolve in a Darwinian sense. ...

[However]... There are good reasons to suppose that culture is an evolutionary system, even if the three claims

[132]

above are true. In two recent articles, Henrich and coauthors...show that the objections mentioned here do not follow from their assumptions. ...the authors demonstrate how Dawkins' original claims about replicators and Darwinian evolution were wrong—replicators are sufficient for cumulative evolution, but not necessary.

...

... Boyd and Richerson argued in 1985 that there is no need to assume particulate "units" in order to build evolutionary models, in fact showing that blending models best produce heritable variation exactly when transmission is inaccurate. ...

The force of [the opposing] arguments...seems to be that cultural learning requires innate, domain-specific psychological mechanisms (we agree!), and therefore that most of the action is in individual psychologies and not in the population dynamics. This conclusion is unfounded:... Culture can have heritable properties and evolve in a Darwinian sense even if it is continuous, error-prone, and individually ephemeral.

Joseph Henrich & Robert Boyd & Peter J. Richerson
Five Misunderstandings About Cultural Evolution
(2008)

[119]

Abstract ...this paper disputes five common claims: (1) mental representations are rarely discrete, and therefore models that assume discrete, gene-like particles (i.e., replicators) are useless; (2) replicators are necessary for cumulative, adaptive evolution; (3) content-dependent psychological biases are the only important processes that affect the spread of cultural representations; (4) the “cultural fitness” of a mental representation can be inferred from its successful transmission; and (5) selective forces only matter if the sources of variation are random. ...

Keywords ...

Recent debates about the utility of “memes” have revealed some fundamental misunderstandings about the nature of cultural evolution. Memeticists and their many critics...

N.B. mem- rather than mim- "eticists"!

...

[120]

... While we think that culture is clearly a Darwinian process, we argue that both camps have been misguided by an overly enthusiastic analogy between genes and culture.

Here in the body of the article the five "misunderstandings" are specifically linked with sources:

(1) Atran (2001)
"The trouble with memes: inference versus imitation in cultural creation."

(2) Dawkins (1976, 1982)
The Selfish Gene
The Extended Phenotype

(3) Sperber (1996)
Explaining culture: A naturalistic approach

(4) none given (and whyever would that be?)

(5) Pinker (1997)
How the mind works

Discrete Replicator Models of Cultural Inheritance can be Useful Even
if Mental Representations are Never Discrete

...

[121]

...

...Atran (2001, 2002) has suggested that there is no evidence that the mental representations that underpin cultural traits are discrete, gene-like entities. Instead, he argues that mental representations are continuously graded entities. Second, Sperber (1996), Atran (2001), and Boyer (1999) emphasize that, unlike genes, ideas are not transmitted intact from one brain to another. Instead, the mental representations in one brain generate observable behavior, a “public representation” in Sperber’s terminology. Someone else then observes this public representation, and then (somehow) infers the underlying mental representation necessary to generate a similar public representation. The problem is that there is no guarantee that the mental representation in the second brain is the same as it is in the first. Any particular public representation can potentially generate an infinite number of mental representations in other minds. Mental representations will be replicated from one brain to another only if most people induce a unique mental representation from a given public representation. Moreover, inferential processes often systematically transform mental representations, so that unlike genetic transmission, cultural transmission is highly biased toward particular representations. Following Sperber (1996), we call the representations favored by processes of psychological inference (including storage and retrieval) “cognitive attractors.”

...we think it is quite likely that the general picture painted by Sperber, Boyer, and Atran is correct—... Nonetheless, we also believe that models which assume discrete replicators that evolve under the influence of natural-selection-like forces can be useful. In fact, we think such models are useful because of the action of strong cognitive attractors during the social learning.

The reason is simple: cognitive attractors will rapidly concentrate the cultural variation in a population. Instead of a continuum of cultural variants, most people will hold a representation near an attractor. If there is only one attractor, it will dominate. However, if, as seems likely in most cases, attactors are many, other selective forces will then act to increase the frequency of people holding a representation near one attractor over others. Under such conditions, even weak selective forces (“weak” relative to the strength of the attractors) can determine the final distribution of representations in the population.

Henrich and Boyd (2002) analyze a simple mathematical model to show that this verbal reasoning is cogent. In this paper we represent each individual’s mental

[122]

representation as a numerical value (x) between zero and one. For example, x might represent an individual’s beliefs about the moon. Individuals with x=0 perceive the moon as a self-aware, conscious entity with goals, emotions, and motivations... In contrast, individuals with x=1 see the moon as simply a big rock,... Now, it is possible to imagine moon-concepts that mix these poles (0 ≤ x ≤ 1). One could believe, for example, that the moon’s movement and shape are out of its control (governed by physical laws), while its color or hue expresses its mood, which in turn influences the weather. ... Such beliefs might seem odd to us because they violate intuitive expectations, which is why cognitive attractors might transform them. In contrast to intermediate concepts (x values), x=1 or 0 is “easier to think.” The formal model described here uses a one-dimensional representation of x, but this easily extends to the n dimensions needed to capture the above example.

Individuals in the model acquire their mental representations by observing the behavior of others. Two cognitive mechanisms affect this learning process. First, inferential transformation captures the manner in which cognitive processes of acquisition, storage, and retrieval alter mental representations in ways to favor some representations over others—cognitive attactors. Because the two extreme representations—“moon as person” and “moon as rock”—are easier to think, they act as cognitive attractors in our example. Individuals who observe behaviors that result from intermediate representations tend to infer mental representations closer to one of the two attractors. The second process, selective attention, captures the tendency for individuals to pay particular attention to some individuals more than others. For example, it could be that in a modern environment, where the representations favored by science are prestigious, people who hold the “moon as rock” representation are more successful than those who hold the alternative, and thus they attract more attention (and are more likely to be learned from). Finally we assume the effects of inferential transformation are much stronger than the effects of selective attention.

... The effects of inferential transformation dominate the early part of the trajectory, rapidly causing almost everyone to have a representation close to one of the two attractors. Once everyone is clustered around one of the two attractors, the rest of the trajectory is dominated by the effects of selective attention. In Henrich and Boyd (2002) we showed analytically that, as long as there are multiple attractors, the resulting population dynamics and the final distribution of mental representations are closely approximated by a discrete-trait replicator dynamics model in which the discrete traits are the strong attractor locations. ...

[123]

Two conclusions are important here: First,... This model shows that a replicator-approximating process can arise and lead to cumulative adaptation even when representations are non-discrete and are transformed during every acquisition. ... Second, we showed that the stronger the inferential transformations, the better the replicator-dynamics approximation. ...contrary to the common assumption that a rich cognitive architecture relegates the selective process to a limited importance...

...

[124]

...

Replicators are not Necessary for Cumulative, Adaptive Cultural Evolution

...

[126]

...

Content-Dependent Psychological Biases are not the Only Processes that Affect the Spread of Cultural Traits

... Genetically maladaptive memes...may readily spread because of their ability to exploit aspects of human psychology in ways that make them more likely to be acquired, stored, and transmitted. However,... humans are quite selective in picking the individuals they will learn from, or be influenced by (“imitate,” if you will). Human psychology seems geared up to selectively extract useful (locally adaptive) information from the individual(s) most likely to possess such information. Skill, success, and prestige all make individuals substantially more likely to be learned from, or imitated. This psychological propensity for “model selectivity” seems to operate across most, if not all, domains of culture...

...

[127]

...

...the human mind’s tendency to focus attention preferentially on certain individuals (independent of mimetic content) means the usual approach to memetic reproduction is insufficient. ...whether a particular genetic-fitness-reducing meme can spread, and how far it will spread, depends on the details—the dynamics of which are best understood by formally modeling the social and psychological processes involved. No categorical claims based on hand-waving arguments about the relationship between genetic and mimetic fitness are likely to hold...

...

Successful Diffusion is not a Measure of Fitness

... How do we know whether a bit of a tune or a catch phrase is a fit meme? Often, it seems, only by asking whether the meme has successfully spread.

... Used in this way, natural selection is a useless, or even misleading, tautology. For example, a recessive gene causing a severe vision disorder called achromatopsia has spread to roughly 30% of the population on the Micronesian island of Pingelap. ...

[128]

...there is no doubt that this gene spread on Pingelap because people who carried it had more descendants than those who didn’t carry the gene. ...it seems that the gene was carried by members of a chiefly lineage whose social position allowed them to survive the aftermath of a severe typhoon that struck the island during the 1700s—it likely spread by a combination of drift and a chance covariation with social status. The same kinds of phenomena are likely at work in cultural evolution. ...

Evolutionary biologists escape this circularity in defining fitness because they have independent means of predicting which genetic variants are more fit. ...

Evolutionary biologists are also in the habit of subdividing their concepts—selection especially—to create a rather diverse family of sub-concepts. ... An incredible variety of things can and does happen [to organisms], and evolutionary biologists collect similar ones together using a rough-and-ready taxonomy to cope with the otherwise overwhelming diversity. ...

...

[129]

...

Even for technological traits, there are many puzzles such as the fact that throughout New Guinea the idea of fletching arrows has never caught on, while just across the Torres Strait in Australia the idea of bows and arrows en toto never spread,...

Selection Does not Require Random Variation

Many people have argued that selection cannot affect cultural evolution because cultural variation, unlike genetic mutations, is not based on random copying errors. Instead, the argument goes, cultural changes are systematic, driven by attempts to innovate or by the cognitive machinery by which individuals make inferences about the beliefs of others, and this means selective processes are not important. ...

...Pinker provides a pithy example showing why selection isn’t everything. The problem is that he then concludes that it is nothing. ... There is no doubt that... the variation that is generated can be highly non-random, and these nonselective processes shape cultural variation. But so what? Selection occurs anytime there is heritable variation that affects survival or reproduction (transmission). ...

[130]

...natural selection may compete with other important directional processes created by human psychology. In any given case, whether one or another force will predominate is an empirical issue.

We also think that Pinker overestimates the importance of conscious problem-solving in innovation... This pervasive “Myth of the Heroic Inventor”...fails to sufficiently recognize (1) the central importance in the history of science and technology of luck, happenstance, and recombination, and (2) that most great inventors actually make only incremental additions to the existing or emerging capacities or understandings of their times. ...

...

[131]

...

Charting a Course: Foundations for a Unified Science of Cultural Phenomena

...

[133]

...

Conclusion

We believe that the Darwinian approach differs from traditional social sciences approaches in ways that are not yet fully appreciated. All five misunderstandings we describe here have a common theme. They result from a tendency to think categorically rather than quantitatively. ...

Kevin N. Laland • Michael J. O’Brien
Cultural Niche Construction: An Introduction
(2012)

[the PDF I'm looking at is not paginated]

Abstract  Niche construction is the process whereby organisms, through their activities and choices, modify their own and each other’s niches. By transforming natural-selection pressures, niche construction generates feedback in evolution at various different levels. ... An important emphasis of niche construction theory (NCT) is that acquired characters play an evolutionary role through transforming selective environments. ... Humans can construct developmental environments that feed back to affect how individuals learn and develop and the diseases to which they are exposed. ...

Keywords ...

... Organisms are generally perceived as being molded by selection to become better suited to their environments (Fig. 1a). Under this perspective, ‘‘adaptation is always asymmetrical; organisms adapt to their environment, never vice versa"...

The niche-construction perspective in evolutionary biology... contrasts with the conventional perspective by placing emphasis on the capacity of organisms to modify environmental states. Thus, "Organisms do not adapt to their environments; they construct them out of the bits and pieces of the external world"...

...

• Adaptation (adaptive complementarity) results from two processes (selection and construction), not one.

...

... One important finding has been that niche-constructing traits can drive themselves to fixation by generating disequilibrium between niche-constructing alleles and those alleles whose fitness depends on resources modified by niche construction. The same runaway process can occur even if the niche-constructing trait is a cultural practice, such as the planting of a crop. Here, costly cultural practices propagate themselves through inadvertently generating selection for local genotypes with which they are statistically associated and subsequently hitchhiking to high prevalence in the process. ...

Niche Construction Theory as a Conceptual
Framework for the Human Sciences

...we suggest that this active, constructive conception of the role of organisms in evolution, and indeed in ontogeny, fits well with conceptualizations of human agency that are widespread within the human sciences. Of course, social scientists do not need to be told that humans build their world, nor that in the process they devise learning environments not only for their offspring but potentially for any conspecific. ... However, social scientists may be less conscious of the fact that other organisms do the same...

...

The Multiple Processes Responsible for Niche
Construction

...

The Multiple Forms of Feedback from Niche
Construction

...

Conclusions

...

Olga Feher, Haibin Wang, Sigal Saar, Partha P. Mitra, and Ofer Tchernichovski
De novo establishment of wild-type song culture in the zebra finch
(2009)

Abstract

... Oscine songbirds exhibit song learning and provide biologically tractable models of culture: members of a species show individual variation in song and geographically separated groups have local song dialects. Different species exhibit distinct song cultures, suggestive of genetic constraints. Absent such constraints, innovations and copying errors should cause unbounded variation over multiple generations or geographical distance, contrary to observations. We asked if wild-type song culture might emerge over multiple generations in an isolated colony founded by isolates, and if so, how this might happen and what type of social environment is required. Zebra finch isolates, unexposed to singing males during development, produce song with characteristics that differ from the wild-type song found in laboratory or natural colonies. In tutoring lineages starting from isolate founders, we quantified alterations in song across tutoring generations in two social environments: tutor-pupil pairs in sound-isolated chambers and an isolated semi-natural colony. In both settings, juveniles imitated the isolate tutors, but changed certain characteristics of the songs. These alterations accumulated over learning generations. Consequently, songs evolved toward the wild-type in 3–4 generations. Thus, species-typical song culture can appear de novo. ...

---

...

Our findings resemble the well-known case of deaf children in Managua, Nicaragua, spontaneously developing sign language, as well as linguistic phenomena such as creolization. ...

...

JOSH MCDERMOTT
MARC HAUSER
THE ORIGINS OF MUSIC: INNATENESS, UNIQUENESS, AND EVOLUTION
(2005)

[29]

...at present there is converging evidence that a few basic features of music (relative pitch, the importance of the octave, intervals with simple ratios, tonality, and perhaps elementary musical preferences) are determined in part by innate constraints. At present, it is unclear how many of these constraints are uniquely human and specific to music. Many, however, are unlikely to be adaptations for music, but rather are probably side effects of more general-purpose mechanisms. ...

... Music stands in sharp contrast to most other enjoyable human behaviors (eating, sleeping, talking, sex) in that it yields no obvious benefits to those who partake of it. The evolutionary origins of music have thus puzzled scientists and philosophers alike since the time of Darwin (1871).

Perhaps should read: "As scientists and philosophers of a certain orientation, the evolutionary benefits which music yields to individuals are not obvious to us.

...

[30]

... A detailed account of the innate mechanisms underlying music and how they interface with cultural experience will place strong constraints on evolutionary explanations of music. This review, therefore, focuses on the various strands of evidence related to the innate mechanisms underlying music perception,...

Theoretical Background

... In our view a definition of music is not particularly important at this stage as long as it is approximately clear what we refer to with the term. This might best be established ostensively over the course of the article, but there are a few features of music that seem worth noting here at the outset. First, by music we denote structured sounds produced directly or indirectly by humans. These sounds often vary in pitch, timbre, and/or rhythm. Second, these sounds are often made to convey emotions and to produce enjoyment, though not always. Thirdly, they often have complex structure, though not always.

Don't we already need to have the answers to our questions here in order to pronounce upon the complexity of any musical structure?

Most of the kinds of evidence we will discuss do not directly demonstrate anything about the initial state of an organism, simply because it is difficult to study organisms in the absence of any experience. We will nonetheless speak of innate traits in the discussion that follows, following conventional usage of the term to denote traits determined by factors present in an individual from birth, even though the traits in question may not emerge until later in development. ...

Developmental Evidence

...

[31]

...

Comparative Evidence

...

[32]

...

Cross-Cultural Evidence

...

Neural Evidence

...

Universal Features of Music

Pitch

...

[33]

...

Lullabies

...

[34]

...

Ancient Instruments

...

[35]

...

Innate Sensitivity to Musical Structure

...

Developmental Evidence

...

[39]

...

Comparative Evidence

...

...although many might describe music as conveying a message, it is not referentially precise in the way that language is, and its medium of expression is primarily emotional. Perhaps for this reason, music is commonly produced and listened to for enjoyment rather than for communicative purposes. ...

...we think there is good reason to think that human and animal songs are neither homologous nor homoplasic... The fact that some animal songs sound musical to our ear is likely a coincidence, as they function as communication signals to the animals that produce them and are produced only under highly restricted contexts. ... Although animal songs may in some sense alter the emotions of animal listeners, no animal sings for the pure enjoyment of others or for its own enjoyment, at least not as far as we know. ... In most singing species, except for those that duet..., only males sing and show unique neural adaptations for song.

...

...the perceptual systems of animals and humans are better candidates for homologies than are the systems for producing songs. ...

...

Musical Preferences

...

[46]

...

Emotional Responses to Music

...

[47]

...

Dedicated Brain Mechanisms for Music

...

Pitch Perception

...

[49]

...

Higher-Level Musical Structure

...

[50]

...

Memory

...

[51]

...

Discussion

...

Geoffrey Miller
Evolution of human music through sexual selection
(####)

Introduction: A Darwinian approach to music evolution

...

... Before Darwin, the natural theologians such as William Paley considered bird song to have no possible function for the animals themselves, but rather to signal the creator’s benevolence to human worshippers through miracles of beauty. Bird song was put in the category of the natural sublime, along with flowers, sunsets, and alpine peaks, as phenomena with an aesthetic impact too deep to carry anything less than a transcendental message. The idea that bird song would be of any use to birds was quite alien before about 1800. ...

... Many commentators have taken Paley’s creationist, transcendental position, claiming that music’s aesthetic and emotional power exceed what would be required for any conceivable biological function. Claude Levi-Strauss , for example, took a position typical of cultural anthropology in writing “Since music is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man.” Where such commentators have recognized any need for consistency with evolutionary principles, they usually explain music as side-effect of having a big brain, being conscious, or learning culture. As we shall see, none of these explanations are adequate if music can be shown to be a legitimate adaptation in its own right. ... No one has ever proposed a reasonable survival benefit to individuals taking the time and energy to produce music, which has no utility in finding food, avoiding predators, or overcoming parasites. But if one falls back on claiming survival benefits to the group, through some musical mechanism of group-bonding, then one ends up in the embarrassing position of invoking group selection, which has never been needed to explain any other trait in any mammalian species (see Williams, 1966). If evolution did operate according to survival of the fittest, human music would be inexplicable.

...

So, group selection  has never been needed to explain any other trait .

Darwin on Human Music

...

An adaptationist approach to music

...

... Most of the speculation about the “origins” of music identifies some ape or human behavior that shares certain features with music,..., and then supposes that the identification of a plausible origin is sufficient to explain a complete adaptation. Evolution just doesn’t work like that. Instead of speculating about precursors, the adaptationist approach puts music in a functional, cost-benefit framework and ask theories for just one thing: show me the fitness!

...

Identifying an adaptation and its function does not require telling the phylogenetic story of how the adaptation first arose at a particular time and place in prehistory,... Even for morphological adaptations, biologists often have no idea when the adaptations that they study first arose, or exactly how they reached their current form. For most psychological adaptations that leave no fossil record, it is not even possible to reconstruct phylogeny in this sense. Nor is it necessary. Adaptationist analysis does not worry very much about origins, precursors, or stages of evolutionary development; it worries much more about the current design features of a biological trait, its fitness costs and benefits, and its manifest biological function. ... It is just not very important whether music evolved two hundred thousand years ago or two million years ago, or whether language evolved as a precursor to music. ...

Design features of music as a sexually-selected adaptation

...

Sexual selection theory: The basics

Darwin (1871) identified two different kinds of sexual selection: aggressive rivalry, and mate choice. Rivalry, especially between males, tends to produce weapons, such as sharp teeth, large horns, and strong muscles. Mate choice, especially by females, tends to produce ornaments, such as colorful tails, innovative sounds, and musky smells. Although Darwin provided overwhelming evidence for the important of female mate choice in producing male ornaments, biologists after Darwin focused almost exclusively on male rivalry,... ...sexual selection was seen as a process where active, competitive males struggled for “possession” of passive females,... Ornaments were usually interpreted as species-recognition signals, for helping animals avoid mating with the wrong species. Only in the last couple of decades has the picture changed, with an astounding vindication of Darwin’s mate choice idea in hundreds of experimental and theoretical studies. ...

Music as a set of sexually-selected indicators

The idea of indicators is that sexual selection shapes animals to advertise reproductively important things like age, health, fertility, status, and general fitness. ...

...

In large-brained animals, there are good reasons to suspect that complex psychological adaptations could function particularly well as sexually-selected indicators. Brains are very complex, hard to grow, and expensive to maintain. ...in primates, probably half of all genes are involved in brain growth,... Thus, brain functioning provides a clear window onto the quality of a large proportion of an animal’s heritable genome. ...

This argument has an almost inescapable corollary: the more important brains became in human survival and reproduction, the more incentive mate choice would have had to focus on brain-specific indicators. ...

Music, considered as a concrete behavior rather than an abstract facet of culture, shows many features that may function as indicators. ...

Music as a set of sexually-selected aesthetic displays

While indicators reveal useful information, aesthetic displays play upon psychological foibles. The basic idea of aesthetic displays is that mate choice works through animal sensation, perception, and cognition, and these psychological processes sometimes have biased sensitivities that other animals can exploit...

Biologists have documented the importance of perceptual biases in sexual selection for many species. Ryan and Keddy-Hector (1992) found that these biases are not randomly distributed, but are typically pointed in one direction. With respect to visual traits for example, all species they investigated preferred bright colors over duller colors, larger displays over smaller displays, and higher contrast over lower contrast. With respect to acoustic traits, all species they investigated preferred calls that were louder rather than softer, more frequent rather than less frequent, longer in duration rather than shorter, lower in pitch rather than higher, higher in complexity rather than lower, and with larger repertoire sizes over smaller repertoires. The relevance to sexual selection for music is obvious: any acoustic preferences that our ancestors had could have been exploited, attracted, and entertained by production of the appropriate musical display.

...

An important twist on the aesthetic display theory is Fisher’s (1930) theory of runaway sexual selection. ... He observed that if peahens varied in the length of tail they prefer, and if peacocks varied in their tail lengths, then they would end up mating assortatively,... If there was an initial bias in the population, with more females preferring long tails than short, and with more females wanting long tails than there are long tails available, then this assortative mating effect would set up a positive-feedback loop between the mate preference and the courtship trait, leading to ever-more-extreme preferences and ever-more-exaggerated traits. Only when the courtship trait’s survival costs became very high might the runaway effect reach an asymptote. Though Fisher’s startling idea was rejected for fifty years, it has recently been vindicated by mathematical models.

The power of the runaway theory is that it can explain the extremity of sexual selection’s outcomes:... ...the preferences involved need not be cold-blooded assessments of a mate’s virtues, but can be deep emotions or lofty cognitions. Any psychological mechanism used in mate choice is vulnerable to this runaway effect, which makes not only the displays that it favors more extreme, but makes the emotions and cognitions themselves more compelling. Against the claim that evolution could never explain music’s power to emotionally move and spiritually inspire, the runaway theory says: any emotional or spiritual preferences that influence mate choice, no matter how extreme or subjectively overwhelming, are possible outcomes of sexual selection.

...

Order and chaos: The interplay between ritualization and creativity in human music

...

Ritualization means the evolutionary modification of movements and structures to improve their function as signals. Ritualization is a typical outcome of signals and displays being under selection to optimally excite the perceptual systems of receivers. ... Ritualizataion results in four typical features: redundancy (repetition over time and over multiple channels), conspicuousness (high intensity, strong contrast), stereotypy (standardized components and units), and alerting components (loud, highly standardized warnings that a more complex signal will follow).

...why do human displays such as music contain so much novelty and creativity if adaptive signals tend to get ritualized? The problem with completely ritualized signals is that they are boring. Brains are prediction machines, built to track what’s happening in the environment by constructing an internal model of it. ... Highly repetitive stimuli are not even noticed after a while. ... Although ritualization makes signals recognizable and comprehensible, novelty and unpredictability makes them interesting. ...

Thus, sexual selection can often favor novelty in courtship displays. ...

...

Music in the Pleistocene

...

Why is human music so different from acoustic courtship in other species?

...

If sexual selection shaped music, why is music made in groups?

...

It is crucial to distinguish between behaviors done in groups and behaviors done for groups. Primates are highly social, often group-living animals. Although almost all of their daily behavior is groupish, with intense, intricate, dynamic social interactions, primatologists have never found it necessary to invoke group selection to explain any primate behaviors. Quite the opposite: progress in primatological studies of social behavior boomed after the ‘selfish gene’ revolution in biological theory, which showed why group selection almost never works. Unfortunately, this sort of methodological individualism, which views group-level effects as emergent phenomena arising from selfish interactions between individuals, has never become very popular in cultural anthropology or musicology. This has created a persistent problem: the fact that music is made in groups is almost always interpreted as meaning that the music is made for groups, and that this putative group-level function is most important both biologically and culturally.

...

There is nothing illogical or impossible about group selection models as theoretical possibilities. However, there are two errors theorists commonly make when invoking group selection in specific situations. The first error is ideological: group selection is often favored because it is thought to be a kinder, gentler, more cooperative, more humane form of evolution than individual level selection, more suited to the production of positive, enjoyable adaptations like language, art, and music. But group selection, like all selection, depends on competition, with some groups winning and some groups losing. ...

The second common error about group selection is failing to consider free-riding: ways that individuals could enjoy the group benefits without paying the individual costs. If this is possible, then selfish mutants can invade the cooperating groups, eroding the power of group selection and the utility of the group-selected adaptation. ...

...

Many ethnomusicologists (e.g. Nettl, 1983) take a different view on music’s group-bonding functions, and seem at certain points to view music as a means for collective access to the supernatural. This merits a brief evolutionary critique: accessing the supernatural can only be the adaptive function of a biological trait such as music if the supernatural actually exists, and if accessing it gives concrete fitness benefits. Evolution would not be impressed by animals that merely think they attain god-like powers through music; they would really have to do it for selection to favor this function. Of course, convincing others that there is a supernatural, and that one has special powers to access it, might function as a perfectly good courtship display. Composers who view music as an intermediary between humans and gods (e.g. Stravinsky, 1947) are, of course, setting themselves up for worship as high priests, without taking any vows of celibacy.

A plea for more quantitative behavioral data on music production and reception

...

To test the more general hypothesis that sexual selection through mate choice has been a major factor in the evolution of human music, we need to see whether music production behavior matches what we would expect for a courtship display. There is some suggestive evidence in this direction. I took random samples of over 1800 jazz albums from Carr, Fairweather, and Priestley (1988), over 1500 rock albums from Strong (1991), and over 3800 classical music works from Sadie (1993), and analyzed the age and sex of principal music-producer for each. The resulting plots indicated that, for each genre, males produced about 10 times as much music as females, and their musical output peaked in young adulthood, around age 30, near the time of peak mating effort and peak mating activity. This is almost identical to the age and sex profiles discovered by Daly and Wilson (1988) for homicides, which they took as evidence for sexual selection shaping propensities for violence sexual competitiveness. Here, the same profiles suggest that music evolved and continues to function as a courtship display, mostly broadcast by young males to attract females. Of course, my samples may be biased, because only the best musicians have opportunities to record albums or have their works documented in classical music encyclopedias. However, Simonton’s (1993) studies of creativity suggest that the demographics of extremely creative cultural production are not significantly different from the demographics of ordinary cultural production, so the former can usually be taken as a proxy for the latter. If so, it seems likely that most music at all levels, from local pub bands to internationally televised concerts, is produced by young men. And that is the exactly the pattern sexual selection would produce (see Buss & Schmitt, 1993; Daly & Wilson, 1994).

...

Conclusion

...

Sexual selection through mate choice is almost unfairly powerful as an evolutionary explanation for things like music that seem impressive and attractive to us, but that seem useless for survival under ancestral conditions. The reason is that any feature you’re even capable of noticing about somebody else (including the most subtle details of their musical genius) is a feature that could have been sexually selected by our ancestors. If you can perceive the quality, creativity, virtuosity, emotional depth, and spiritual vision of somebody’s music, then sexual selection through mate choice can notice it too, because the perceptions of ancestors with minds like yours were literally the agents through which sexual selection operated. ...

Really?

But they would really have to do it for selection to favor this function of quality, creativity, virtuosity, etc.

What if I merely think I can perceive it?

...

Progress concerning music evolution seems most likely by adopting the same adaptationist approach that has proven so fruitful in understanding bird song and other complex signal systems. ... To many musicologists, this may seem a radical approach, threatening a psychologically and genetically reductionist view of music. To students of sexual selection, however, to say that a human adaptation has been shaped by mate choice is grant it the least reductionistic, most humane origin, as a part of the mind selected by minds like ours for its ability to provide mental and emotional enjoyment. ...

Daphna Oyserman
Culturally Fluent Theories, Metascience and Scientific Progress: A Case Example
(####)

Abstract

Some ideas just feel right, others not so much. Familiar ideas are easier to process, seem to enjoy broad support, and are more likely to be accepted. Culture-based familiarity with the gist of an idea enhances the sense that things are as they ought to be. An idea’s cultural fluency reduces the likelihood that people apply systematic rule-based reasoning strategies even when these would be appropriate. People shift to more skeptical reasoning strategies when ideas are unfamiliar and do not fit culture-based assumptions. ...

Luca Fumarco, Benjamin G. Gibbs , Jonathan A. Jarvis, Giambattista Rossi
The relative age effect reversal among the National Hockey League elite
(2017)

[1]

Introduction

Evidence of a Relative Age Effect (RAE) has attracted interest beyond academia due to the fact that seemingly benign policies—such as age cut-offs—may shape later life success [1]. While this phenomenon can be found in multiple studies of hockey [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], most evidence relies on simple metrics to gauge success, such as assessing if there is a disproportionate percentage of hockey players (junior and professional) on a team roster that were born in the first quarter of the year.

Surprisingly, few studies have examined the RAE on player productivity in the National Hockey League (NHL) [7, 8]. In these studies, there is evidence of a RAE reversal. Although players born at the end of the year are less likely to make the NHL, of those who do, they played more games, scored more points, and earned higher salaries [7, 8]. We argue that although the RAE appears to initially favor relatively older players in the minor leagues, if

[2]

relatively younger players make the NHL, they will likely outperform their peers across a number of outcomes. Thus, being an “underdog” in the minor leagues may lead to improved performance in the NHL.

...

Literature Review

Previous Results

... Relative age differences have been found to impact child outcomes such as education, selfesteem and physical strength,. ...

[3]

...there is growing evidence that the RAE may actually reverse as players advance in professional sports. A reversal has been found in soccer, rugby, handball, cricket, and hockey...

Explanations for the RAE reversal

We highlight two compelling explanations in the literature to understand why a RAE reversal might occur. The first is psychological. Smaller players in junior hockey who subsequently make it to the NHL demonstrate higher than average resilience due to their ability to overcome size limitations. ...these “underdogs” are better equipped to overcome subsequent obstacles and succeed in professional play. ...—an underdog effect.

The second explanation suggests that the players born later in the year (relatively younger) who then become successful athletes may not only have a degree of resilience, but also superior ability... For these younger, smaller players to overcome, “a system that discriminates against them”, they need more than grit and determination, they must also be more talented than their relatively larger counterparts to counteract their size disadvantage. It follows that these younger players are likely positively selected... In the NHL, the proportion of relatively young players with superior ability is potentially larger than that of relatively older players because more of the relatively older player’s success has been artificially enhanced by the RAE.

...there might be a less obvious factor influencing the reversal—the NHL draft age cut-offs. ... . Those born in the last quarter of the year must wait another year to enter the draft. Ironically, this means that the same factors that initially benefitted those born in the beginning of the year may reverse their advantage by making them the youngest on their NHL team. ...

...

Data and Methods

...

[6]

...

[9]

...

Discussion

...

[12]

...

Limitations

...we cannot disentangle the RAE from season-of-birth effects, which are shown to exist in the educational system in the US and that could also affect youth hockey... ...US winter-children are disproportionately born to single mothers, teenage mothers and mothers without a high-school degree. The impact of family structure could cause negative season-of-birth effects...

Conclusions and future directions

...

Kathleen A. Corrigall, E. Glenn Schellenberg and Nicole M. Misura
Music Training, Cognition, and Personality
(2013)

[1 (abstract)]

... These findings reveal that: (1) individual differences influence who takes music lessons and for how long, (2) personality variables are at least as good as cognitive variables at predicting music training, and (3) future correlational studies of links between music training and non-musical ability should account for individual differences in personality.

INTRODUCTION

...

[2]

...

...small and intermittent causal effects cannot account for the large cognitive differences between groups that have been reported in correlational studies that compare pre-existing individuals who vary in music training. ... Considering that interventions designed specifically to improve cognitive abilities (e.g., Head Start) achieve only modest success... , the available data are best interpreted as showing that high-functioning children are more likely than other children to take music lessons, which may enlarge their pre-existing cognitive advantages. Moreover, because general cognitive ability is relatively stable across the lifespan (Deary et al., 2009), pre-existing differences are also likely to account for associations between music training in childhood and/or adolescence and subsequent cognitive performance in adulthood (Schellenberg, 2006, 2011b).

One of the most intriguing findings to date is that music training in childhood predicts academic achievement even when IQ is held constant (Schellenberg, 2006). In other words, musically trained children are particularly good students, which points to individual differences in non-cognitive abilities or in cognitive abilities other than IQ. Children who take music lessons may have relatively high levels of curiosity, motivation, persistence, concentration, selective attention, self-discipline, and organization. These factors could influence their academic success, their performance on a wide variety of cognitive tasks, and the likelihood that they pursue and continue taking music lessons.

What general constructs that can be measured reliably, besides IQ, might distinguish musically trained from untrained individuals? Although some scholars have suggested a role for executive functions, the results are equivocal in this regard,... Examinations of social skills reveal that drama lessons cause improvement but music lessons do not (Schellenberg, 2004), and that piano lessons (Costa-Giomi, 2004) and music-enrichment classes (Portowitz et al., 2009) are not associated with improvements in self-esteem. Comparable null or inconsistent findings emerge when considering associations between music training and emotional intelligence in adulthood (Trimmer and Cuddy, 2008; Schellenberg, 2011b) or emotion comprehension in childhood (Schellenberg and Mankarious, 2012).

...

[3]

...

Our research questions motivated the use of a correlational design because a true experiment would not enable us to examine whether personality and cognitive variables influence the likelihood of taking music lessons in the first place. Random assignment to music lessons is also plagued by practical, methodological, and generalizability issues. ...

... Unlike most previous research, duration of training was treated as an outcome variable rather than a predictor variable, in line with our view that pre-existing differences influence who takes music lessons. Because there is a clear genetic component to general cognitive abilitiesand to personality, individual differences in these areas are unlikely to be solely a consequence of an environmental factor such as music training. ...

STUDY 1

...

MATERIALS AND METHODS
Participants

The adult sample comprised 118 undergraduates...

...

[4]

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

...

...IQ was associated with duration of playing music regularly when demographic and personality variables were held constant, and, more importantly, openness-to-experience was associated with duration of playing music when demographics and IQ were held constant. The results also imply that openness-to-experience is at least as good as IQ at predicting duration of playing music...

STUDY 2

...

MATERIALS AND METHODS
Participants

The sample comprised 167 10- to 12-year-olds...

...

[8]

...

The results of Study 2 reveal that in some instances, personality may be even more important than cognitive abilities at predicting an individual’s likelihood of taking music lessons in the first place, and then persisting at music training for long durations. ...

GENERAL DISCUSSION

... The observed associations between musical involvement and multiple individual-difference variables – including those measuring cognitive ability or personality – are virtually impossible to be solely a consequence of music training.

In both studies, personality variables predicted duration of music training even when demographics and cognitive ability were held constant. Among children, moreover, cognitive ability no longer predicted duration of music training when demographic and personality variables were held constant. Note that by collapsing IQ and average grade into a single variable, we actually increased power... Our results suggest that when predicting who is likely to take music lessons and for how long, individual differences in personality are at least as important as cognitive variables among adults, and even more important among children. They also raise questions about virtually all previously reported correlations between music training and cognitive abilities that failed to account for personality. Moreover, despite the oft-cited claim that music training is a good or ideal model for the study of plasticity, our findings highlight pre-existing differences between children who take music lessons and those who do not in terms of demographic variables, cognitive abilities, and personality traits. It is nevertheless possible that music training serves as a mediating variable between personality and cognitive abilities, such that personality influences who takes music lessons, which, in turn, enhance cognitive abilities.

In neither sample was musical involvement associated with agreeableness, extraversion, or neuroticism, but no such associations were expected. One somewhat surprising finding was that compared to conscientiousness, openness-to-experience was a better predictor of involvement in musical activities. For example, among adults, conscientiousness was not associated with duration of playing music regularly. Among children, only openness-toexperience contributed unique variance in predicting duration of music training when demographic and cognitive variables were held constant. Nevertheless, relatively high levels of conscientiousness rather than openness helped to explain why musically trained students do better in school than one would predict from their IQs. In short, individuals who choose to take music lessons are primarily those who are interested in learning and experiencing new things, especially in artistic domains, but they do well in school because they have high IQs and because they are particularly hard-working and self-disciplined.

...

[9]

...

...we do not deny a role for the environment in shaping cognitive ability (or personality),... Our parsimonious proposal is that different individuals choose different activities (including music lessons) in contrast to the conventional view that music lessons make individuals different, or that music lessons serve as a mediating variable between pre-existing traits and cognitive functioning. Because far-transfer effects are very infrequent without substantial overlap in: (i) what is being transferred and (ii) the context in which such transfer will occur, the burden of proof should rest on those who claim systematic far-transfer effects from music lessons to cognitive abilities.

... Individuals with low music aptitude would be unlikely to pursue music lessons, which would guarantee a positive correlation between pre-existing listening abilities and music training even before the training begins. The proposal of a causal link from music training to listening abilities is also belied by evidence indicating that the association is moderated by motivational state.

The idea that a potentially enjoyable activity such as learning to sing or to play a musical instrument could have beneficial side-effects on cognitive functioning is obviously appealing. It is important to remain realistic, however, about the power of music training to alter cognitive abilities. Enthusiasm about plasticity, particularly among neuroscientists, must be balanced with an awareness of findings from behavioral genetics, which reveal a genetic component to virtually all behaviors. Much previous research may have overestimated the effects of music training and underestimated the role of pre-existing differences between children who do and do not take music lessons. Our results implicate a role for personality – in addition to demographics and cognitive abilities – in the decision to take music lessons and in the continuation of such lessons for extended periods. ...

So...

Sure, I'm "cherrypicking." You'll just have to trust me that I've been sufficiently conscienscious in doing so. Sometimes I'm literally drunk when I'm working on this stuff.

The point is: it's okay for people to reject your cultural activity and to choose to pursue some other cultural activity instead. It's not against the law. They can do what they want. And when they do not do what you want them to do, you do not get to blame this on a failure of marketing or presentation unless you can produce some piece of research roughly along the lines of the above studies.

Roger E. Beaty, Bridget A. Smeekens, Paul J. Silvia, Donald A. Hodges, and Michael J. Kane
A First Look at the Role of Domain-General Cognitive and Creative Abilities in Jazz Improvisation
(2013)

Mathias Benedek, Caterina Mühlmann, Emanuel Jauk, and Aljoscha C. Neubauer
Assessment of Divergent Thinking by Means of the Subjective Top-Scoring Method: Effects of the Number of Top-Ideas and Time-on-Task on Reliability and Validity
(2013)

Graham Frederick Welch, Ioulia Papageorgi, Elizabeth Haddon, Andrea Creech, Frances Morton, Christophe De bezenac, Celia Duffy, John Potter, Tony Whyton, Evangelos Himonides
Musical genre and gender as factors in higher education learning in music
(2008??)

[from word doc]

ABSTRACT

...an important implication is that those musicians who are expert in jazz, rock and traditional musics – whose musical genres place emphasis on an aural tradition that is often characterised by improvisation and a limited use of musical notation – have musical identities that are more closely aligned with those of adolescents in secondary schools.

Well..this should be interesting!

Is close  alignment on the level of identity really some kind of secondary school dealbreaker?

Introduction

...

...social ecology theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1979)... individual development is conceived as being nested within layered contexts from the immediate (‘microsystem’), through the local (‘mesosystem’) with its informal and formal extensions in the surrounding community (‘exosystem’), to the wider culture with its macro-institutions and public policies (‘macrosystem’) (Lerner, 2006).

...

Music education in schools and in higher education for intending teachers

...

Recent research into the apparent paradox between young people’s musical engagement inside and outside school suggests that the underlying reasons relate to divergences in musical identities. Music in school is reported to be perceived as ‘for learning’, ‘teacher directed’ and ‘serious’, whereas music outside school is ‘for enjoyment’, ‘self-selected’ and ‘popular’ (Hargreaves & Marshall, 2003). Similarly, a new UK study of adolescent musical engagement in three secondary schools in Suffolk found that only a small proportion of the 13-year-old pupils that were interviewed enjoyed school music (Saunders, 2008). This particular group of pupils were likely to have formal instrumental performance skills (primarily acquired outside school through private tuition) that were useful in their successful engagement with the school music curriculum. However, the majority of their peers had alternative, less positive perspectives. Some regarded themselves as deskilled by the requirements of the experienced music curriculum, whilst others did not identify with school music, even though they were relatively accomplished musicians, because they saw ‘school music’ as irrelevant and a possible threat to their ‘musician’ status amongst their peers.

...

It is possible, potentially, to be skeptical of any 13-year-old who regarded themselves as deskilled by a school curriculum!

Music education in higher education for intending performers: the IMP project

...

Biographical information revealed that classical musicians began formal learning on their first instrument at an earlier age... and were influenced musically by parents, instrumental or vocal teachers and formal groups. Conversely, non-classical musicians tended to be slightly older in their formative musical encounters... and reported that typically they were most influenced by well-known performers and membership of informal groups (Creech et al, op.cit.).

...

Conclusion

...

This short paper proves that it is possible to declare publicly that "If it is art it is not for everyone, and if it is for everyone it is not art" without the earth falling into the sun. You just have to choose carefully from among the variously available bodies of empirical evidence. You have to choose evidence that hits some other Populist nerve, which runs its own interference for its own concurrent Elitist implications.

Solomon E. Asch
Opinions and Social Pressure
(1955)

[2]

... All the social sciences take their departure from the observation of the profound effects that groups exert on their members. ...

...

...the interest in hypnosis aroused by the French physician Jean Martin Charcot... two other physicians... who demonstrated that they could put most people under the hypnotic spell. ... Bernheim proposed that hypnosis was but an extreme form of a normal psychological process which became known as “suggestibility.” ...

It was not long before social thinkers seized upon these discoveries as a basis for explaining numerous social phenomena, from the spread of opinion to the formation of crowds and the following of leaders. ...

When the new discipline of social psychology was born at the beginning of this century, its first experiments were

[3]

essentially adaptations of the suggestion demonstration. ... Most of these studies had substantially the same result:... ...Edward L. Thorndike reported that he had succeeded in modifying the esthetic preferences of adults by this procedure. Other psychologists reported that people’s evaluations of the merit of a literary passage could be raised or lowered by ascribing the passage to different authors.

...the very ease of success in these experiments arouses suspicion. Did the subjects actually change their opinions, or were the experimental victories scored only on paper? ...

The investigations were guided by certain underlying assumptions,... ...that people submit uncritically and painlessly to external manipulation by suggestion or prestige, and that any given idea or value can be “sold” or “unsold” without reference to its merits. We should be skeptical, however,...

...

Of the 123 put to the [present] test, a considerable percentage yielded to the majority. Whereas in ordinary circumstances individuals matching the lines will make mistakes less than 1 per cent of the time. under group pres-

[4]

sure the minority subjects swung to acceptance of the misleading majority’s wrong judgments in 36.8 per cent of the selections.

Of course individuals differed in response. At one extreme, about one quarter of the subjects were completely independent and never agreed with the erroneous judgments of the majority. At the other extreme, some individuals went with the majority nearly all the time. The performances of individuals in this experiment tend to be highly consistent. Those who strike out on the path of independence do not, as a rule, succumb to the majority even over an extended series of trials, while those who choose the path of compliance are unable to free themselves as the ordeal is prolonged.

...

Which aspect of the influence of a majority is more important—the size of the majority or its unanimity? The experiment was modified to examine this

[5]

question. ... the size of the opposition was varied from one to 13 persons. ... Under the pressure of a majority of three, the subjects’ errors jumped... But further increases in the size of the majority apparently did not increase the weight of the pressure substantially...

The presence of a supporting partner depleted the majority of much of its power. ...

...

Solomon E. Asch
Studies of Independence and Conformity:

Charles Efferson1,2,4 Peter J. Richerson1,3,4 A Prolegomena to Nonlinear Empiricism in Human Evolutionary Ecology
(2007)

Bennett G. Galef
The Question of Animal Culture
(1991)

Alan R. Rogers
Does Biology Constrain Culture?
(1988)

...


[3]

Culture and Adaptation

... For some evolutionists, natural selection produces adaptation by definition... This, however, confuses what is being explained (adaptation) with the theory used to explain it (natural selection). If adaptation is defined to be the product of natural selection, then some other word is needed to refer to the observation that individuals seem well suited to their environments, and no such word has been suggested. Use of the same word for both purposes is confusing, and has probably contributed to the misconception that Darwin’s theory is circular... To avoid confusion, I use the word “adaptation” only to refer to the observation that organisms are somehow suited to their environments. In any particular case, the relationship of adaptation to natural selection is a matter of hypothesis, not of definition.

Francisco J. Gil-White
Are Ethnic Groups Biological "Species" to the Human Brain? Essentialism in Our Cognition of Some Social Categories
(2001)

[515]

Constructivist studies in recent anthropology have made an intellectual and moral contribution by repeatedly demonstrating that neither supposed “races” nor ethnic groups—or “ethnies”²—are natural kinds in any biological sense. Biologists have reached the same conclusion... However, establishing the ontological fact may have clouded our understanding of local epistemologies. ... Even though ethnies and races do not have essences, we still need to investigate why ordinary people often believe that they do and how this affects their behavior. ...

...

[footnote]
2. I prefer the term “ethnie” to the more common “ethnic group” because these are “groups” only in certain special cases. Generally speaking they are categories rather than groups of people, and the usage of the word “group” has served only to mislead theorists, who often appear to confuse, for example, processes such as ethnic mobilization with ethnogenesis.

[516]

...

These days “good” anthropologists do not essentialize groups, and therefore no self-proclaimed essentialists are found in anthropology journals. But ordinary folk are not good anthropologists or sophisticated constructivist scholars. Quite to the contrary, they are naive essentialists, and I will try to explain why. ...

What Is A "Group"?

...

In psychology, although some distinctions have been made between so-called primary (face-to-face) and other kinds of groups, the fields of stereotyping and group perception are strongly biased by the explicit or implicit assumption that the term “group” represents a scientific category... ...a large literature has focused on groups with no history or content, formed in the lab on the slimmest and least ecologically valid of categorical distinctions... However, recent experiments with ethnic groups, more realistic stakes, and a procedure that makes the allocators’ costs and benefits contingent on choices made by allocators show that allocators may favor the out-group... And the in-group bias in the original minimum groups is easily made to disappear with what appear to be minor framing variations... In sum, a straightforward application of the results of the minimum-group literature to ethnic groups and other similar moves are valid only if “group” is a useful scientific category, which is likely to be true only if the astonishing variety of social distinctions that qualify for the label “group” are meaningfully unified in human perception and experience.

Are they? The only theoretical effort to confront this issue head-on...originates with Campbell

[517]

(1958). Campbell argued that a collection of individuals is perceived as a group to the degree that this collection has the characteristics of an entity. ... [arguments following from this] ...

... The concept of entitativity needs conceptual clarification, and the empirical tests typically pit not a highly against a less entitative social category but rather a social category against an aggregate... At an intuitive level, it seems implausible that entitativity is closely related to essentialism: firms, for example, are highly entitative, but they are not essentialized—and they are characterized by much weaker stereotypes than much less entitative social categories such as ethnic groups. ... Finally, the use of the word “essence” in the above literature is self-consciously derived from the categorization literature and its recent focus on natural-kind categories; however, the claim of essentialism among the above authors appears implicitly to have become a stand-in for “stereotyping” or “causal reasoning” even though these are not the same thing. The usage does a disservice to the explicit pedigree of the term “essentialism.” After all, one can use a predictive stereotype for a social category without seeing it as an essentialized natural kind.

What about the alternative to the gestalt approach? Perhaps there is specialized mental machinery for processing particular social categories in distinct and relatively discontinuous ways. This hypothesis flows naturally from the categorization literature, which has gotten much mileage from focusing on the structure of categories as a window into the way in which the brain parses the world. ... Particularly interesting here is the distinction between “natural” and “artifact” categories, which are processed in different ways... Some have taken this as an inspiration to argue that certain social categories are processed more like “natural kinds” and other social categories more like “artifacts”... My own argument is in this vein.

I will argue... that domains important to our survival and reproduction in the past have probably selected for machinery specifically dedicated to processing the domain-relevant inputs. Each of these dedicated “mental organs” or “modules” is described in a cognitive sense... as a set of processing biases and assumptions activated by the domain-relevant inputs. ...

The categories certainly could be "Categories of Art"...

The "Ugly Duckling" Hypothesis

...

[519]

...

If it is true that we naively and intuitively process ethnies as species, this is likely to improve our understanding of the behavior of ethnic actors in different contexts. This is an increasingly urgent concern of anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists, for obvious reasons. In these literatures, the prejudice of “circumstantialists” (a.k.a. “instrumentalists”) is that ethnies are socially “constructed” as people rationally follow their associative interests. But if ethnies recruit their members, mate, behave, and perceive each other as natural living kinds, then they are not constructed from the individual political decisions of rational actors in relatively short time-scales. They are constructed—though not for that any less real, mind you—with ideologies of descent-based membership that constrain the constructive process. The present argument thus supports some of the prejudices of “primordialists”...

Natural Kinds in Context: A Brief History of Categorization Theory

...

[520]

...

...though people may make fuzzy guesses when assigning people to ethnic categories (if they have imperfect background information about them), this is fuzziness and ambiguity in identification procedures. It does not imply ambiguity in concept representation (category structure) if the fuzziness disappears when people are given the missing information. Claims by constructivists that ethnic categories are fuzzy (ambiguous, malleable, etc.) may result from confusing identification with representation...

---

[520]

...

from classical categories to fuzzy ones

From the time of Aristotle until recently, all categories were thought to have necessary and sufficient conditions... An “object” is always either “A” or “not A.” ...

Ludwig Wittgenstein recently developed the concepts of “family resemblances,” “centrality,” and “gradience.” The members of some categories (e.g., game ), he noted, did not all have certain properties in common, and for them no set of necessary and sufficient conditions could establish category membership. ...

Beyond membership, some members may be more typical of the category than others. ...

Finally, some categories are characterized by “gradual” membership. For example, crisply separating poor from rich is impossible,... To age is, as it were, gradually to lose membership in the category young and gain it in old . ...

Eleanor Rosch’s empirical and theoretical work, with that of others, revolutionized the way we think of categories and led to the current understanding that not all categories have the structure “A or not A.” She introduced the term “prototype” to stand for the “cognitive reference point” or most central member (or subcategory of members) of a category and demonstrated the corollary “prototype effects”: some members of a category are learned, recognized, etc., more easily, which is consistent with their being more representative or typical of the category . At first category structure was inferred directly from these prototype effects, but Rosch

5. A similar criterion should operate for results that are “statistically significant,” by the way, but the classical view has strangely prevailed over what should obviously be a fuzzy category.

[521]

(1978) eventually recognized that demonstrating prototype effects did not, in fact, reveal category structure, as different concept representations may be consistent with the same prototype effect.

For example, if we establish that some tokens of a category are more typical because people tell us they are better examples of the category or because these tokens are identified more quickly, does this show that the category in question has a probabilistic structure such as young people? That is, will some category members have higher percentual membership (e.g., be younger) than others? Not necessarily. Armstrong, Gleitman, and Gleitman (1983)... found that subjects indeed felt that some numbers, such as 3 or 7, were more representative of odd number than others, such as 109 and 2,003. However, “if subjects are asked directly whether typical odd numbers are or can be more odd than atypical ones, they will flatly deny it” (Keil 1989:30, my emphasis). This result shows that even classical categories with necessary and sufficient conditions, such as odd number , may show typicality effects.

Rosch cogently argued that the demonstration of prototype effects constrained the range of possible category structures to those which could account for them but in the same breath maintained that necessary and sufficient conditions could not. As we see above with the case of odd number, however, it seems that they can, and so classical categories may not be as rare as was initially believed... Typicality effects are not incompatible with newer understandings of classical categories, for they may result from processing during identification of members rather than concept representation . Thus, though some token members may be considered more typical and therefore be processed better and recognized more quickly, it is still possible that for some categories membership is a yes/no distinction. Natural kinds, despite demonstrable prototype effects, appear to be classical categories with necessary and sufficient conditions of membership.

natural kinds as classical categories

Locke’s (1964[1690]) distinction between nominal and real essences has led to one between nominal and natural kinds (Keil 1989:36–37). Nominal kinds reflect more or less arbitrary conventions of usage or else have definitions based on their purposes for human use (e.g., artifacts such as pencil ), whereas natural kinds (e.g., fish) at least carry the intuition that they carve out important causal domains and processes in the natural world . When natural kinds are revised —or rather, when we revise our ideas about which objects out there in the world should be excluded from, or included in, a natural kind—we feel this less as a definitional shift than as a gain in understanding of the category itself , whose definition we discover rather than arbitrate⁶.

In natural kinds typical appearances defer to our intuitions of “deep,” nonobvious explanatory properties causally responsible for category inclusion. Consider that humans seem ready to accept, if the information is conveyed by an expert source (e.g., a biology teacher), that a dolphin is not a fish, even though a cursory inspection suggests that it is. Similarly, we happily leave fool’s gold to fools, even though we ourselves need an expert to decide which is which. Artifact categories , however, are a different matter ; try to imagine someone accepting the statement by a librarian that what looks like a book is really a magazine. Malt (1989) has systematically investigated these intuitions and found that for borderline cases on the basis of appearance, people feel that they need experts to sort natural kinds , but with artifacts such cases are felt to be a matter of opinion (e.g., the statement “According to experts, this is a shirt” is silly, but “According to experts, this is a fish” is not).

According to "expert" philosophers, critics, curators, and artists deyself, dis here mass-produced bauble no. F1476 is a work of art, but dem dere bauble nos. F600 through F1475 and F1477 and up, dem dere are not...

(...btw, an art "expert" is merely someone who is in the business of getting you to look at certain baubles and to ignore others. The lowest hanging "expert" fruit is to make silly statements and see if people will actually just swallow them whole. If this does prove effective, then there is no need to graduate to any more sophisticated priestcraft...)

Criteria of identification (i.e., appearances) supply—for most instances (and in particular those typical of the category)—a rough-and-ready way of guessing that an object is inside the category (if it looks like a duck, we’ll guess “duck”). The guesses (1) are probabilistic, (2) are graded by the number of category-relevant characteristics that are readily apparent in a given object, (3) imply judgments of typicality, and (4) will generate prototype effects. However, just as in odd number, these effects do not imply fuzzy or ambiguous definitions, for appearances do not determine criteria of inclusion in natural kinds (Gelman and Markman 1987:1532):

Natural kinds are categories of objects and substances that are found in nature (e.g., tiger, water, cactus). . . . natural kind terms capture regularities in nature that go beyond intuitive similarity . . . . Natural kinds have a deep, nonobvious basis ; perceptual features, though useful for identifying members of a category, do not always serve to define the category. ... Because natural kinds capture theory-based properties rather than superficial features , some of the properties that were originally used to pick out category members can be violated, but we will still agree the object is a member of the kind if there is reason to believe that “deeper,” more explanatory properties still hold.

Because in natural kinds we seem to privilege something deeper than mere appearances, some have proposed that we intuitively conceive of inner “essences”: “ Almost everyone has had the intuition that things are not always what they seem and that there is something deeper and more basic to a kind than what is immediately apparent. One way to capture this intuition is to

6. Even if by “arbitrate” we mean the emergent “Saussurian” consensus which is the result not of any act of legislation but of more or less mutually reinforcing patterns of practice.

[522]

argue that things have essences that are often difficult to discern immediately”. Thus, inclusion in a natural kind follows from a necessary and sufficient condition—possession of the essence (or, by extension, from evidence of meeting the conditions for having the essence). Surface characteristics are responsible for typicality effects but not category inclusion , for we treat the former as the typical manifestations or consequences of the essence rather than direct evidence of essence possession . What this implies is that the categories are not fuzzy even if our appearance-based guesses may sometimes be . For species categories, Keil (1989) has demonstrated that young children faced with gradual pictorial transformations of one species into another (e.g., lion into tiger) are very reluctant to designate an animal as simultaneously belonging to both. They will consider the animal to have been transformed, but this happens abruptly, for the children “saw the animals as fully changing in kind across the critical pair of adjacent pictures” . This suggests that even fuzzy transformations cannot overwhelm a strong intuition that the categories are not fuzzy .

All of the preceding arguments apply to both natural-kind substances such as gold and natural living kinds such as mouse. What is specific to the cognition of “species” categories is our intuitions about (1) how the category essence is acquired/transmitted, which has implications for (2) how it can be established that something has one essence rather than another. In species categories, the possession of an essence of X, I argue, promotes a strongly held intuition that one mates with X and produces Xs in reproduction. Thus, whether a token has an essence of X answers to the questions (1) Does it produce Xs in reproduction? (2) Is it descended from Xs? and (3) Does it mate with X?

Identification Versus Categorization in Mongolia

My study population consists in the main of Torguud seminomadic pastoralists (a small Mongol ethnic group in western Mongolia). ... Apart from Torguuds, there are other Mongol ethnic groups in the area, as well as a large population of Kazakhs (perhaps 30% of the local population), with the greatest local ethnic contrast being that between Mongols and Kazakhs. ...

This site was chosen because it offers desirable controls for a number of variables. ...

The questionnaire I constructed for the study was as follows:

1. If the father is Kazakh and the mother Mongol, what is the ethnicity of the child?

2. The father is Kazakh, the mother Mongol, but everybody around the family is Mongol and the child has never even seen a Kazakh outside of the father. ... ?

3. A Kazakh couple has a child that they don’t want. They give it in adoption to a Mongol couple when the child is under a year old. ... ?

...

[523]

...

The responses to question 1 show that Mongols (like other pastoralists) are patrilineal. However, this usually refers to clan and subclan ascription and material inheritance; here we see that fathers also transmit ethnic ascription. The question was open in that they were not forced to choose among predetermined options, but in another sense it was forced by presuming that children have an ethnic status at birth. However, if respondents considered membership a matter of one’s absorbed culture, perhaps they should have objected that “it depends” and explained on what. No such answer was ever given.

... The answers to questions 2 and 3 show that my respondents categorize the child according to descent. In question 3 this implies that one can be an X and not know it... This is especially clear in 1998, where the randomized questions do not imply to subjects (as the 1997 sequence “1, 2, 3” does) that I expect and want enculturation-based answers. The prevalence of descent in question 3 rules out a “rearing” patrilineal model.

Of particular importance here is that biological descent is for most a necessary and sufficient criterion of inclusion, even though members are typically identified by recourse to prominently displayed cultural traits. When the adopted child is called a “Mongol” (1998 sample) this is despite the fact that my informants agree that the child will not look or behave anything like a Mongol... If she [the child] existed, a naive local traveler would doubtless classify her as Kazakh. But learning that the biological parents were Mongol would lead to a revision of the guess and a recognition that surface features had misled one as to the “‘deeper’, more explanatory properties”... ...the ethnographic literature suggests that all over the world—no matter how culturally marked ethnic actors may be—the “rule” for making ethnic ascriptions is based on blood much more than on enculturation.

Some may object that perhaps my informants are reasoning not about ethnic groups but about what they believe are “races.” Hirschfeld (1996) has shown essentialism in the cognition of “race.” There are some problems of comparison because of differences in the details, but one of Hirschfeld’s manipulations was an adoption situation very similar to mine, and his results amount to finding that children reason that “race” will be unmodified by early adoption into the out-group family... I think that my respondents do “racialize” the ethnic groups, but we must then explain why this occurs even when there are no sharp phenotypic differences...

...

[524]

...

The Species “Essence” in Human Cognition

One could argue that so far there is no demonstration of Torguuds’ processing their local ethnic categories as “species.” What the data show is that one assumes the ethnic ascription of one’s biological parents. It could be that, for them, an ethnic group is simply a descent group... To show that ethnic groups are processed as natural kinds one must go beyond the above evidence to show that putative essences are attached to the labels. ...

Most of the cognitive psychological work on human reasoning about living kinds has been conducted in Western settings with Westerners. More cross-cultural work is needed, but what little we have is suggestive. ... This work is so far consistent with the hypothesis that many important aspects of living-kind cognition constitute human universals. ...

psychological essentialism

***the remark made at the milo show***

Relative “similarity” has no objective basis because an infinite number of things can be predicated of any object and therefore unconstrained comparisons between objects A, B, and C cannot tell us which two are more similar (Goodman 1972, Watanabe 1969). Thus, the similarity we see between any two things depends entirely on what our brains consider material and immaterial about them —what matters is not the shared predicates but the represented shared predicates. “For example, both tennis balls and shoes share the predicate ‘not having ears’, but it is unlikely that this predicate is part of our representation of either tennis balls or shoes” (Medin and Ortony 1989:182). Medin and Ortony speak of “psychological essentialism” as the stance that places two “objects” in the same category if they are believed to share the same constitutive and inalienable hidden essence (even when they are superficially different) . They believe that this is what governs category inclusion in natural kinds.

The argument does not commit us to the belief that essences actually exist. For some natural kinds, such as “substances” and “elements,” chemical or atomic constitutions may qualify as legitimate essences, but the Darwinian revolution made it clear that biological natural kinds cannot be characterized as having real essences. In any given population, for any given genetic locus, either (1) there is variation now or (2) there will be variation at some point in the future, and such variation does not ipso facto force an unusual variant or mutant out of the category which names the population (in fact, typically it does not). However, we may nevertheless think in essentialist terms. Psychological essentialism is a claim about people’s categorization processes , not about the world these processes organize ; it is “not the view that things have essences, but rather the view that people’s representations of things might reflect such a belief (erroneous as it may be)”.

Medin and Ortony argue further that the description of an essence may be a complete mystery to us, but this is no detriment to essentializing a category, for we will simply assume that the essence—whatever it is—is there. They call this assumption the “essence placeholder”, and they note that it forces a way of conceptualizing the category: whatever category members look like and do, it is because of that unseen underlying “essence” or “nature” (whatever it is).

essences and development in living kinds

...

[525]

... Gelman and Wellman presented children with examples of animals (e.g., tiger) that were raised with other kinds of animal (e.g., horses) in the complete absence of their own kind. ...children relied more on category than on environment. For example, they answered that a tiger raised with horses (and never having seen another tiger after the early transfer) would display tiger traits and behaviors as an adult rather than horse traits and behaviors. Children seem aware that the nature of an animal is relatively impervious to the environment of development and that adult traits and behaviors not present in the earlier stages of ontogeny are the product of the animal’s intrinsic developmental program...

This is the central point of the The Ugly Duckling. It is not merely that the ugly duckling is really a swan because the parents are swans but also that being a swan it will develop into a particular kind of adult regardless of varying environments of rearing.

essences and reproduction

How is a living-kind essence acquired? To what extent do we see the process of reproduction as uniquely responsible for transmitting a species essence? ... Rips (1989) had a sample of adults listen to a story about a “sorp,” a flying animal... typical of a bird. This sorp falls into some toxic waste and is transformed:... acquires transparent, membranous wings... —everything typical of a flying insect. The transformed sorp eventually meets a normal female sorp and mates, and this leads to the laying of eggs which produce normal sorps. ...most thought that the transformed sorp was more likely to be a bird than an insect...

This shows, first of all, the independence of similarity and categorization. If participants in this study were merely comparing the features of the transformed sorp with those of the concept “bird” to see whether there was a critical mass of matches (as in, e.g., Collins and Loftus’s 1975 spreading-activation model or Smith, Shoben, and Rips’s 1974 feature-comparison model), they would have concluded that the transformed sorp was not a bird. Second, it shows the importance of what I believe is the necessary and sufficient condition for categorization in a natural living kind: biological descent. Despite the transformation, the strange sorp is nevertheless the offspring of normal sorps and produces normal sorps in reproduction—therefore, it is still a bird and not an insect. An interesting modification to Rips’s experiment would perhaps add asexual reproduction yielding transformed offspring. I predict that respondents would in this case say the transformed sorp was an insect (experiments currently under way will answer this question). Whereas Rips tested adults, Keil (1989:chaps. 8, 9) conducted experiments pitting descent relations against appearances with children and found that by age 10 they had strong intuitions that membership in a species category is a matter of descent, regardless of current appearance or transformations. Yoruba adults in Nigeria, with no exposure to Western-style schooling in biology, reasoned similarly (Jeyifous 1986). It seems that descent from a species member is taken as necessary and sufficient for possession (through inheritance) of the biological kind essence and that one property assumed of any biological kind essence is ability to reproduce the kind. essences and insides Gelman and Wellman (1991:215) carefully distinguish between insides and essences as follows: The insides of an item are the matter residing physically behind or under its outer layer (e.g., the bones, heart, and blood of a dog, the stuffing and wires of a chair). Insides are concrete and ultimately observable, yet typically remain unobserved. An essence is the unique, typically hidden property of an object that makes it what it is.... Essences generally are never observed, and in fact may remain unknown. . . . Both insides and essences are difficult to define precisely. Do a dog’s insides begin under the fur, under the skin, under the flesh, or indeed even interior to the skeletal framework? . . . Essences are often unspecifiable, and by their nature require an inference about some deeper organization or disposition. The distinction is salutary because humans probably do not equate the insides with the essence as if they were coextensive. However, it seems very likely that we think of essences as somehow located “inside.” Whatever it is that makes a thing what it is—its essence—we imagine it not as lying on the surface of the thing but as somehow inside it, even though we may deny that the essence amounts to nothing more and nothing less than the thing’s insides. Simons and Keil (1995) have shown that young children know very little about the insides of living things (although they do anticipate that the insides of living kinds will be “natural” and different from those of artifacts). Moreover, children’s understanding of how the insides are related to biological function is completely unspecified, as was the same understanding for adults before the development of modern biology. And yet, Gel- 526 F current anthropology Volume 42, Number 4, August–October 2001 man and Wellman (1991) found that with insides-relevant items, including species categories, children reason that the function changes when the insides rather than the outsides are removed and that identity is more likely to change when the insides rather than the outsides are removed. This is consistent with the idea that they believe the essence is inside and that removing the insides will take the essence with them, thus altering the nature of the thing. Earlier studies by Keil (1989:217–31) show that children will entertain that interventions can transform an animal from one kind to another if the intervention involves the insides rather than merely the outsides. The interview transcripts strongly suggest that insides are critical to species-category membership. Are Torguuds Essentialists? To show that Torguuds are essentialists, the data must reveal their cognition of groups such as Kazakhs and Mongols to share important similarities with the features of essentialism described above, provided we can agree that the preceding section presents a plausible picture of species essentialism. torguuds on development A sample of “hard” primordialists in the 1998 study (i.e., those who, even in question 3, believed that ascription depended only on the ethnicity of the biological parents) were asked an additional question (Gil-White 2001b). I reviewed the details of question 3 (which in the 1998 study has Kazakhs as the adopters) and then asked, “This adopted child, will he become exactly like the Kazakhs, or will he be somewhat different?” When respondents answered that the child would be somewhat different (a common locution was “No, he can’t/won’t become exactly like the Kazakhs”), I asked, “How will the child be different?” Almost invariably, the response to this was that the child’s features would be like those of a Mongol, revealing that subjects had understood the question as it was intended, in terms of similarity to Kazakhs as a group and not to the adoptive parents in particular.10 Then I asked, “And how will the child behave? Will the child behave exactly like the Kazakhs, or will he behave somewhat differently?” A majority of respondents (17 of 23) replied that the child would behave not quite like the Kazakhs but somewhat like a Mongol. This suggests that, in addition to believing ethnic ascriptions to result from descent, Torguuds consider this to be more than mere labeling of one’s ascent. Apparently, being a Mongol or being descended biologically from Mongols implies resisting enculturation into an out-group to a certain degree, even when such enculturation is all one knows and even when one has had no 10. Of course, the belief that the child will necessarily be different phenotypically is more ideological than empirical, as there is substantial phenotypic overlap between the two groups. contact with the group from which one is biologically descended. This is consistent with believing that a Mongol, by virtue of being descended from other Mongols, has a Mongol essence which confers an innate potential that will play itself out developmentally “on its own steam,” as it were (as in Gelman and Wellman 1991). The intuition that the adopted child will be different and behave somewhat differently remains despite the fact that my subjects accept the extreme premise, namely, that the child in question 3 will have learned Kazakh language, norms, habits, and customs and will have had not the slightest exposure to Mongols and no awareness of Mongol descent. I also asked a small sample—all primordialists in question 3—after how many generations of intermarrying the adopted child’s descendants in the male line would become Kazakhs. The answers ranged from two generations to “never,” but the samples of essentialists (n p 8) and nonessentialists (n p 6) are here much too small to draw conclusions. However, one observation appears significant: fully half of the essentialists responded that the child would never become a Kazakh, and this was the modal response for this group. In contrast, not one of the nonessentialists gave such an answer. This suggests that essentialism is connected to an intuition of “intrinsic” nature and therefore inalterability. conscious theories and intuitive “theories” As my fieldwork progressed and I experienced people’s beliefs outside the rigid context of the interview format, I came to believe that my questionnaires were good tools for revealing people’s conscious but not their intutiive “theories.” I use the term “intuitive theory” to substitute for “theory” or “naive theory” as the term is used in cognitive psychology, where it refers to the organizing and constraining (but subjectively unnoticed) content that underlies human concepts and categories. By “conscious theory” I mean an elaborated belief that organizes knowledge and that the individual is aware of having. The responses my questions elicited, I submit, result from an interview context that forces people to use their conscious theories—presumably the joint result of their cultural upbringing and their personal experiences—in a very explicit way. In a previous paper (Gil-White 1999) I called conscious theories regarding the ethnic membership charter “ethnic transmission and acquisition models.” That my questionnaire investigates such models and not intuitive theories is no cause for despair. Conscious theories are important evidence, and a theory that human cognition is innately designed for intuitive processing of ethnies as natural living kinds makes the nontrivial prediction that a majority of cultures in the world will turn out to have blood-based models of ethnic transmission and acquisition. However, if the design of the human brain is what we are after, conscious theories can be misleading, for they typically do not replace our intuitions (cf. Atran 1990:x). For example, it has been demonstrated that, when thinking intuitively, people who understand a law of statistics which is in conflict gil-white Are Ethnic Groups Biological “Species” to the Human Brain? F 527 with their innate biases for interpreting probabilities and distributions will use the innate bias, although they will recognize that they have made a mistake when the problem they were asked to consider is rephrased in terms of the statistical law (Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky 1982:495–97). These mistakes are “errors of application.” In what follows I recount a few anecdotes that uncovered such errors. My friend Tsoloo (Tsoh-lo`h) is a bright 21-year-old Torguud who served as my guide in one of my brief forays into Kazakh territory. He was never formally subjected to my questionnaire (except for the essentialism questions), but he developed a keen interest in my research; he watched me administer the questionnaire to many Torguuds, Uryankhais, and Kazakhs and shared his views of their answers with me. Tsoloo is what I call a circumstantialist, and a vociferous one. To him, the right answer to question 3 is that the child is a member of the adopting ethnie. He also insisted repeatedly that the right answer to my question “Will this adopted child be exactly like the [adopting ethnie] or somewhat different?” is that the child will be exactly like the adopting ethnie—how could it be otherwise? It bothered him considerably that many people gave essentialist answers. To him it was all quite simple: if you have the customs of an ethnie and live with them, you are a member of that ethnic group, and if you are raised by that ethnie from birth you will be no different from them no matter who your parents are. He is even a hard circumstantialist, that is, a rational-choice theorist, who maintains that adults can choose to make the ethnic shift by living with and acquiring the customs of another ethnie. But this was when we were talking about my questions; when discussing other topics, he often seemed like an essentialist. For example, he is afraid of the Uryankhai because he believes they can all cast curses. The Kazakh can also cast curses, according to him, but cannot be touched by anybody’s curses because of their strong religion, Islam. (This makes them theoretically more dangerous than the Uryankhai, but in fact they are supposedly less prone than the Uryankhai to cast curses because they are not bad people.) Now, of course, one could argue that this is all compatible with his circumstantialism because he may believe that being able to cast curses like an Uryankhai or a Kazakh and being more or less well-disposed towards others is a matter of being a good Uryankhai or Kazakh performer in cultural terms and of being reared amongst people with certain views. In fact, he listed the impossibility of putting curses on the Kazakhs as an example of their being buruu nomtoi (“with the wrong book,” where “book” is a euphemism for “culture”). But these conversations somehow never felt circumstantialist to me. I was wondering about these things one day as Tsoloo, his friend Tulgai (also a circumstantialist), and I crept on our horses up to the barren and rocky mountaintops in order to cross back into Torguud country. To investigate the matter, I initiated the following exchange: “Tsoloo, I have a question: if I learn the Uryankhai customs, can I then put curses on people like an Uryankhai?” “No, you can’t.” “Why not?” He paused. “You have to be Uryankhai.” “But you said that if I had the customs of an ethnic group I would be a member of that ethnic group. So why can’t I cast curses like an Uryankhai if I learn all their customs?” I was explicitly reminding him of the model he had resorted to when considering my questionnaire and therefore stacking all the odds against his persisting with an essentialist answer. “You can’t,” he said. “That’s right, you can’t,” joined Tulgai. “Well, why not?” Tsoloo paused for a second and said, “You . . . have to be born to an Uryankhai.” The two were agreed on this point. “So unless one of my parents is Uryankhai, I can’t put curses on people?” “True.” “That means that if I was adopted at any early age by the Uryankhai, I would be just like them but I would not be able to cast curses . . .” “True.” “Is it the same with the Kazakhs?” “The same.” At this point Tulgai rode off to kill a marmot, and Tsoloo and I were left alone to continue our conversation. I paused for a second in order to consider what a tantalizing contradiction Tsoloo had just provided and how completely unaware he was of it. Had he been any other circumstantialist it would have been striking but not this striking. Tsoloo had seen me administer the same questionnaire at least a dozen times, and we had discussed it together and thought a lot about it. And only a few hours before I had administered the questionnaire twice with him present. Yet, he was completely unaware that his current answer was at variance with the position he had been explicitly maintaining all along, and the fact that my last question closely mimicked the question I actually use to probe essentialism did not clue him to what was going on. Tsoloo was not thinking theoretically; he was thinking intuitively. I was very excited at this insight but instead showed myself mockingly upset. “Tsoloo, you lied to me,” I said with a wink and a smile. “Why?” “Because you have been telling me all along that if a child is adopted from birth into another ethnie he will be just like the adopting ethnie. But that is not what you think. Suppose that the child born of Mongol parents and adopted by Kazakhs was a Torguud Mongol. Well, then he would be a lot like the Kazakhs but not exactly like them, because he would not be able to cast curses. You see?” “Oh . . .!” He looked down at his horse and took his free hand to his mouth in thoughtful expression I had seen many times. An embarrassed smile crept over his 528 F current anthropology Volume 42, Number 4, August–October 2001 face, and then he looked at me, nodding with a smile that he accepted defeat graciously. “You actually think that child would be a little bit different, but that is not what you told me when we talked about my experimental questions.” “Yes . . . yes, I see. Aha . . .” He looked up the road with a curious expression. He seemed to be pondering the intricacies of his own mind. “Let me ask you this: if an Uryankhai child was adopted by Torguuds, just as in question 3, would he be able to cast curses or not?” “Well [a significant pause] that child doesn’t know that his real parents are Uryankhai . . . he would be able to, but he wouldn’t know it.” “I see. If he knew, he might cast curses, but since he doesn’t, he won’t.” “True.” I paused again, then explained a difficulty. “This is a problem for my research, Tsoloo. You gave an answer based on customs when I asked you the experimental question, and you said the child would be exactly like the adopting ethnie. But that’s not what you really think. What if other people who answered like you also think like you? You seem to believe the adopted child will look and talk exactly like the adopting ethnie, and yet . . . and yet, you believe that the child, inside, is somehow still different.” “Yes, yes. That’s right!” He seemed excited that I had chosen just the right words to explain his thoughts. (I had of course carefully chosen those words.) “Maybe some of the people who answered like you also think this way, that the child is somehow still different inside.” “That is what they all think,” he said, very convinced. “You think so?” “I am sure.” Notice that, in Tsoloo’s mind, to have that thing which confers the hidden potential of an A and which is “inside,” you have to be a biological descendant of an A. Later, thinking about our conversation, Tsoloo confided in me that he had made a mistake and amended his explicit views about cursing to coincide with his conscious model. I considered using my conversation with Tsoloo as a template to structure informal conversations with others in order to test intuitive essentialism. This proved impossible because such an instrument requires that others agree with Tsoloo’s premise that Uryankhai can all cast curses, etc., and there was too much variability in this domain of belief. My data on Kazakhs are of much lower quality than those for the Mongols because I spent less time with them and at first I did not realize that one had to remind them explicitly that the child in question 3 would acquire both Kazakh culture and religion. However, I think I can safely claim that Kazakhs are, by and large, circumstantialists (as measured by my questionnaire) so long as they understand that the adopted child will become a Muslim in addition to assuming the other aspects of Kazakh culture. Kazakhs in Xinjiang, China, told Bessac (1965) that the children they stole from Mongolian and Tibetan communities were fully Kazakh upon their conversion to Islam, and the Kazakhs I worked with had immigrated only a generation ago from Xinjiang. However, here too I found that conscious models and intuitions can differ. When I asked Kazakhs alone, a majority was circumstantialist. On one occasion, however, at a bayr (party), a large group of Kazakh old men took an interest in my research, and I asked the questions publicly of the whole group. The old men answered in chorus, and they turned out to be heavily circumstantialist and not at all essentialist. But there was one lone dissenter, a young man, who protested furiously and gave contrary, primordialist and essentialist answers each time. Later, while I was pondering how interesting it was that the Kazakhs should be ascriptive circumstantialists, a large circle of young men sitting to my right began protesting furiously to me that what the old men had been saying was not true. Prominent among them was the lone dissenter from the earlier choruses. Apparently he was nowhere near being alone, merely the only one who had the courage to withstand the embarrassment of appearing publicly as a deviant. Another young man was also quite angry and doing a lot of talking. The argument was familiar: the child was a Mongol because the biological parents were Mongol. Her culture did not matter in the least. I turned to them and said, “So I, for instance, can never become a Kazakh? If I stayed here and learned Kazakh and Kazakh customs, married a Kazakh girl, and became a Muslim, I would still not be a Kazakh?” One spoke for all of them when he replied, “Even if you do everything like a Kazakh, and everybody says you are a Kazakh, you still aren’t a real Kazakh because your parents are not Kazakh. You are different inside.” And he pointed to his chest. All the others were nodding. “That girl in your question, you know? Everybody would say that she was a Kazakh, but she would not be a real Kazakh.” My main interlocutor and I talked about other things for a while, and then I brought us back. “Can I ask you another question?” “Okay.” “You say that I can never become a Kazakh even if I convert and do everything like a Kazakh, because my parents are not Kazakh, true?” “True.” “But is this also true for the girl in my last question? Is it true for the girl who is adopted at a very young age?” “Yes. People will say that she is a Kazakh, but she is not a real Kazakh.” “Because her parents are not Kazakh?” “Exactly.” “She is also different inside?” I pointed to my chest. “That’s right.” This time I had not been the one to supply the word “inside.” And this time too, being an X “inside” was a matter of being descended biologically from X. When I was back at Khurmet’s (my 22-year-old Kazakh host’s) yurt, I had him alone for a moment, so I asked him, gil-white Are Ethnic Groups Biological “Species” to the Human Brain? F 529 “Isn’t it interesting that the young guys thought so differently from the old guys?” “Yes,” he said with a quizzical smile. “Tell me something: when I asked you my three questions the other day, you answered like the old guys. The young guys told me it was true that the adopted girl would be called a Kazakh but did not agree that she would be a real Kazakh because she was different inside. What do you think? Do you think the girl will be a real Kazakh?” He thought for a second and then said, “This is what I think: I think that the girl is Kazakh u¨ ndesten like I said before. . .” “But is she jinkhene [real] Kazakh u¨ ndesten?” “Yes. I think she is jinkhene Kazakh.” “And you think she will be exactly like Kazakh people?” “Yes. She will be exactly like Kazakhs . . . but . . . I also think, you know . . . that she will be different inside.” He pointed to his chest just as the other man had done. “Inside she is a Mongol,” he concluded. Astounding, I thought. Khurmet thought she was a real Kazakh but a Mongol “inside.” A contradiction? Perhaps. Apparently Khurmet has a conscious theory of what makes a real Kazakh, but intuitions are different. They tell him that the girl in my example would still somehow be different inside, despite all outward appearances and ascriptive practices. These experiences convince me that the formal questionnaires significantly underestimate the degree to which people are intuitively inclined to think about ethnic groups in essentialist terms. “ethnie” as a privileged category Do other descent categories show similar essentialism? If all do, then there is nothing particular about ethnies, as distinct from other descent categories. Some have argued that ethnicity is just kinship writ large, and van den Berghe (1987:[1981]) has presented the most complete statement. But if ethnicity is not primarily processed as a kinship category (merely being occasionally rendered as one for the purposes of mobilization), then there should be differences in the processing of ethnic and kinship categories. The Torguuds of Bulgan Sum divide themselves into five khoshuun, 11 which have most of the properties usually associated with clans. Each is a named group (Bangyakhan [my host community], Taajinkhen, Beelinkhen, Khovog, and Khoshuud); membership requires biological descent from other members; each has a sacred “totem” (a mountain) particular to it; each is small enough that everyone knows everyone else; and the members occupy a common territory. I am unaware of any putative epon11. In the canonical model that scholars use, the sequence ethnic group, tribe, clan, patrilineage is often rendered u¨ ndesten, yastan, khoshuun, omog. However, many of my informants in Bulgan Cum used the sequence u¨ ndesten, yastan, omog, eleg. ymous ancestors,12 and there are no rigid rules of clan exogamy. In fact, the clans are highly endogamous, and it is virtually impossible to find two people among the Bangyakhan who are not related to each other in one way or another. The exogamous units are named patrilineages within the clans, called omog (although many people lost track of which omog they belonged to in communist times). To investigate whether clans are processed as are ethnic groups, I presented 14 individuals with the setup for question 3 but substituted clan names for the ethnic groups. The child-giving family was Bangyakhan and the adopting family Beelinkhen. All the other details were the same: the child did not know of the adoption, never met any Bangyakhan, learned Beelinkhen customs, and would speak with a Beelinkhen accent. Then I asked, “Will this child be exactly like the Beelinkhen, or will she be somewhat different, somewhat like the Bangyakhan?” I had earlier pretested, with a different sample, to see whether most Bangyakhan thought that there were cultural differences among the clans. Almost everybody in that sample did, even though they considered them very minor and were absolutely incapable of listing them (except for noticeable differences in speech to which I can attest myself and perhaps some wedding songs). A very interesting thing happened: question 3 suddenly became very difficult to understand. Every time I asked the question “Will this child be exactly like the Beelinkhen, or will she be somewhat like the Bangyakhan?” people began talking about individual differences. This answer was typical: “Well, she will have the biological parents’ face and character, but everything else will be like the adoptive parents.” It was very hard to make them see that the question had to do with being exactly like the Beelinkhen (versus somewhat like the Bangyakhan) as a group, rather than exactly like the adoptive Beelinkhen parents versus somewhat like the biological Bangyakhan parents. This is a misunderstanding that virtually never occurred (perhaps no more than twice) when the categories used were Mongol and Kazakh. The novel difficulty is in itself telling. Moreover, every single time I finally succeeded in conveying the meaning of the question as I intended it, my subjects responded that the child would be exactly like the Beelinkhen. On one occasion, I administered the question to my friends To¨mo¨rbaatar, Mukhtar, Batsu¨ kh, and Tsoloo. They all answered nonessentially. My furious scribbling piqued their curiosity, so I explained that I was interested 12. Many Torguuds in Bulgan Sum are descendants of immigrants from neighboring Xinjiang and therefore probably descendants of Torguuds who migrated from Central Asia to the Volga steppes around the year 1600 and then back to Jungaria (in modern Xinjiang) in 1771 with other tribes, collectively known as the Kalmyk. Most of those who returned to Jungaria were Torguuds (Khodarkovsky 1992:232). Krader (1963:11) said that there was a transition from genealogical to named clans among the Kalmyk in the early 20th century, but he was writing about the Volga Kalmyks who remained in Russia. Since the descendants of those who returned also now have named rather than genealogical clans, it is possible that this transition occurred much earlier. 530 F current anthropology Volume 42, Number 4, August–October 2001 because people didn’t always answer like this when the groups used were Mongol and Kazakh, instead of Beelinkhen and Bangyakhan. Seeing is believing, so I asked the question again but with the original Mongol/Kazakh setup (which these respondents had never heard). This time my four respondents split two ways. To¨mo¨rbaatar and Tsoloo gave nonessentialist answers (but see above for a deeper examination of Tsoloo’s thoughts), and Mukhtar and Batsu¨ kh gave essentialist answers. Mukhtar, in particular, was adamant: there was no way a child of Mongols adopted by Kazakhs could become exactly like the Kazakhs. Both essentialists agreed that the child would speak and have Kazakh customs but insisted that her thoughts and character would be Mongol. Batsu¨ kh’s answer illustrates the distinction well. Later I went up to him and asked: “Look, you initially told me in the ‘clan’ question that the child would take after the biological mother and father in terms of character, but is that a Bangyakhan character or the character of the biological mom and dad?” “Biological mom and dad.” “Okay. And you also told me in the Mongol/Kazakh question that the child would not become just like a Kazakh, but would have a Mongol character. But is that a Mongol character or just the character of the biological mother and father?” “A Mongol character.” Then I asked him to clarify the clan question again for me so that he could see precisely the distinction I was after. His answer did not change. I conclude that ethnies are not processed as large kin groups (though they are often popularly rendered as such, and this is interesting). Kinship seems to prime schemas that deal with individually varying differences such as one will find in the personalities of different individuals within an ethnie. Ethnicity seems to prime essentialism about qualities general to all members of the kind. Why Should Ethnies Be, Cognitively, Species? I have made an empirical case that Torguuds essentialize ethnies in the manner of species. If this is a panhuman proclivity of our psychological design, as I claim, then natural selection must have favored it. I will argue that there are good reasons to believe this. First of all, species essentialism motivates inductive generalizations about hidden properties, so that we will assume that anything nonobvious learned about one beaver, say, will be true of all beavers. This is adaptive because beavers in fact do share many nonobvious properties and such generalizations reduce the costs of learning. In ethnies, I will argue, inductive generalizations yield similar benefits. inductive inferences in species Let us assume that shared appearances are typical of members of a species but not determinative of membership (e.g., African wild “dogs,” coyotes, foxes, and wolves are not dogs). Let us further assume that what is determinative of membership is the essence, whatever it is. Finally, let us assume that essences are cognized as “hidden,” “more than meets the eye,” and therefore causative of a great many hidden properties and characteristics that are common to all category members but not immediately apparent (e.g., coyotes are “wily”). It seems reasonable, then, that (1) knowledge that an item is a member of natural kind A will lead to the automatic assumption that it has an A essence; (2) learning that this item has hidden property P should lead to the assumption that P is either caused by or a part of the essence and thus to the generalization that P is true of other A’s; and (3) As that do not look like the target item will be thought of as having property P anyway, and nonA’s bearing a strong similarity to the target will nevertheless be thought of as lacking P (unless the property is also specified for their natural kind as well). Studies involving 4- and 3-year-olds (Gelman and Markman 1986 and 1987, respectively) have confirmed these propositions and Gelman and Markman’s explicit hypothesis that natural kinds will favor categorical rather than appearance-based inductive inferences. For example, children did not make inductive inferences from a target cat with a white stripe down its back to a skunk even though they looked almost identical, but they did generalize to another cat that looked quite different from the target. Why do natural kinds promote inductive generalizations of nonobvious properties? Gelman and Markman (1986:184–85) observe that natural-kind categories have rich, correlated structures and that many of the properties that correlate strongly are nonobvious at first and therefore “extend far beyond our original categorization. For example, giraffes share a particular diet, life expectancy, gestation period, DNA structure, and so forth—attributes that are impossible to know by casual inspection. . . . The highly correlated structure of natural kinds suggests that new features learned about one category member will often be projected onto other category members as well.” A Darwinian unpacking of this statement might go like this:13 Any animal that relies heavily on learning will benefit by reducing the costs of the learning process. If we can reliably learn about whole suites of objects merely by examining one of them, then evolution would have failed us if it had not provided mechanisms for doing so. Of course this argument applies to artifact categories (which are also characterized by rich, correlated structures) as much as to natural kinds. What makes induction in natural kinds special is that inductions are easily made for nonobvious (i.e., “hidden”) properties, and this is because members of natural kinds in fact do share many nonobvious properties. Now consider artifacts: If I showed you a ceramic pitcher and told you that it breaks easily (a hidden property), you would be wrong to infer that this is true of all pitchers, since they can be made of wood, stone, coconut shell, metal, and, in modern times, unbreakable plastic 13. Quine (1977:166) first observed the usefulness of natural-kind induction and its likely Darwinian explanation. gil-white Are Ethnic Groups Biological “Species” to the Human Brain? F 531 (cf. Gelman 1988). The things that members of an artifact category typically share are perceptually obvious: their parts and their interconnections are constrained to be similar because they must fulfill the same function; the hidden properties (such as the properties of the materials they are made of) can vary widely so long as the artifact itself fulfills the same function. Thus, if I show you that a ceramic pitcher breaks easily, you would generalize that to ceramic anythings (because ceramic is a “substance”), but you will not think of this as a “pitcher property” (for evidence, see Gelman and O’Reilly 1988: 881). Recently, Atran et al. (1997) tested to see whether people made inductive generalizations for “hidden” or nonobvious properties (e.g., susceptibility to a disease, possession of a protein) equally at all levels of the biological taxonomic tree. They found that people have a strong preference for making such generalizations at the species level even though, as shown by Rosch et al. (1976), this is not the “basic level” (established on perceptual grounds) for biological taxonomies. Although a domaingeneral mechanism does indeed seem responsible for the rank-similarity of the basic level in all sorts of taxonomical domains, the biological domain has the idiosyncrasy that nonobvious properties maximally cluster not at its basic level (the “life-form” level, e.g., bird, fish) but at the species level. Our cognition thus apparently favors inductive generalizations in species because this is where it makes most sense, and the cognitive idiosyncrasy suggests that we indeed have a privileged biological domain of cognition. Atran et al.’s finding that people socialized into two very widely divergent cultures show the same absolute privilege for the species level when making inductive inferences supports the hypothesis that the living-kinds or “folkbiology” module is a human universal. inductive generalizations in ethnies Processing an ethnie as a species, with the attendant penchant for assuming that any hidden properties true of one member will be true of all, is adaptive because members of an ethnie—like members of a species—share many important “properties” (norms) specific to the ethnie. This claim of norm clustering may be counterintuitive for anthropologists and sociologists, post-Barth (1969), who have decided that ethnic groups and “cultures” are not coextensive, and therefore I elaborate. Barth’s (1969) views on the relationship between ethnicity and culture are widely accepted. He is often presented as debunking the idea that ethnic boundaries organize culture. Following his critique, anthropologists are now very skeptical that ascriptive boundaries closely correspond to “culture” boundaries (e.g., Fried 1975; Tooby and Cosmides 1992; Hirschfeld 1996:21–22). Such interpretations of Barth are, however, dead wrong. What Barth debunked was the idea that ethnic boundaries organize the totality of culture in a holistic way—that is, that ethnic boundaries are closely coextensive with discontinuities in “trait inventories” arbitrarily compiled. But practically in the same breath he insisted that what ethnic boundaries do enclose is “ethnic organization” (Barth 1969:12) and that the cultural content most relevant to ethnic groups is (1) the diacritical features that signal membership and (2) “basic value orientations: standards of morality and excellence by which performance is judged” (p. 14). So long as we agree that standards of morality and performance are “culture,” Barth is not really subtracting all culture from ethnicity, as if ethnic ascriptions were truly arbitrary, but rather insisting on a kind of culture as most relevant to ethnicity: standards of performance and the diacritics that signal membership inside a performance-norm boundary. As Barth (1994: 17–18) himself has recently observed, this part of his argument is often ignored: The issue of cultural content versus boundary, as it was formulated [by Barth (1969)], unintentionally served to mislead. Yes, it is a question of analyzing boundary processes, not of enumerating the sum of content, as in an old-fashioned trait list. But locating the bases of such boundary processes is not a question of pacing the limits of a group and observing its markers and the shedding of members . . . central and culturally valued institutions and activities in an ethnic group may be deeply involved in its boundary maintenance by setting internal processes of convergence into motion; and we need to pay special attention to the factors governing “individuals’ commitments to the kind of personhood implied by specific ethnic identities” (Haaland 1991:158). Coming back to our main thread, concepts of personhood, as such phenomena are realized through the observation of performative norms with interactional consequences, are nonobvious—hardly things that are readily apparent on casual inspection of an ethnic actor. If Barth is right, then, fully socialized members of an ethnic out-group (and even of the in-group!) will have many strongly correlated hidden properties. These hidden properties are extremely important, for they determine how easy or difficult it will be to coordinate with another human being. Barth argues that this is precisely why ethnic groups form: they demarcate “ways of being” (a commonly held view [see Smith 1986:41; Deutsch 1953]). According to Barth, we must define ethnic groups in terms of the actors’ own ascriptions because these imply commitments to certain interactional norms: “If they say they are A . . . they are willing to be treated and let their own behavior be interpreted and judged as A’s and not as B’s” (Barth 1969:15). Coethnics therefore understand each other to be “playing the same game.” But why do norms cluster in intercorrelated clumps? Barth explains the maintenance of ethnic boundaries in terms of the punishments that accrue to those who fail to fulfill the normative expectations of their coethnics. Such punishments enforce in-group conformity and maintain normative differences between ethnic groups, which differences in turn—because actors assume they are signaled in ethnic diacritics and ascriptions—entail 532 F current anthropology Volume 42, Number 4, August–October 2001 constraints on interethnic interaction (Barth 1969: 17–18). Although Barth says nothing about conformism resulting from coordination costs, this suffices for boundary maintenance and is probably originally responsible, without punishment, for the emergence of intercorrelated clustering of interactional norms. Norm conformism14 allows humans to maximize the number of potential interactants in their local community with whom to engage in mutually beneficial cooperative and coordinated endeavors. Much evidence from psychology (e.g., Miller and McFarland 1991; Kuran 1995; Asch 1956, 1963[1951]) suggests that we are indeed norm conformists. To drive on the left side of the road when in Britain because that is what the British do would be sound advice even if there were no ‘bobbies’ to inflict polite scoldings, and the wisdom it contains is routinely repeated as common sense in the proverb “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” Notice also that the proverb and example contain wisdom about what to do when one is an immigrant. In an ancestral environment composed of wise conformists, immigrants would absorb the norms of the host community, and this would prevent the blending-of-norms effect that immigrants would otherwise have on cultural variation (Henrich and Boyd 1998), ensuring in this way that at least some important interactional norms would regularly clump discontinuously across the human landscape. Thus, it seems plausible that after the emergence of the conformist adaptation, the ancestral environment became populated with more or less well-defined, discontinuous norm clumps. There are two reasons that thinking of such incipient ethnic groups as “species” is advantageous in these circumstances: 1. Interactions with those socialized into different interactional patterns and expectations will not as often be felicitous, and the costs incurred—in energy and time wasted—will concede the evolutionary advantage to any mutants who manage somehow to discriminate (I am indebted to Robert Boyd, personal communication, for this argument). A naive species theory of the ethnic world would represent ego’s norm group as one natural kind and other norm groups as different kinds with different natures, making the interactional choices favored by a necessary self-similarity bias rather clear. 2. To the extent that out-group members are not irrelevant, adaptation to a norm-clumped world presents the dual challenge of avoidance and prediction. It is certainly best to be able to predict as much as possible about out-group members without having to obtain this knowledge through too much costly interaction with them. Since conformist behavior will ensure that members inside the same “conformist sampling horizon” (i.e., inside the same norm boundary) will show strong intercorrelations for many nonobvious behavioral patterns and expectations, inductive generalizations (from the one to the 14. This corresponds to what Kelman (1958) famously divides into the three steps of “compliance,” “identification,” and “internalization” and is distinct from informational conformism, for which see Boyd and Richerson (1985) and Henrich and Boyd (1998). many) will usually be a good way of cheaply obtaining and using such valuable information. These adaptive considerations can now be articulated with a plausible story of how ethnic groups came to look like species. Even putting aside the costs of different rearing, adoption, and conjugal practices, which must loom large for parents, we must consider that in simple societies marrying off one’s children begins a long-term alliance with affines. Parents were bound to learn through trial and error that coordination in long-term reciprocity was more difficult and costly with people outside the norm boundary. Incipient ethnic groups thereby become normatively endogamous in part because of parental enforcement. Next, because much of culture is acquired at a young age and is developmentally stable, expert practitioners of a group’s norms—when groups are endogamous—would tend to be those born of two member parents, creating the illusion that their cultural mastery was biologically inherited. Finally, such incipient groups began labeling and conspicuously marking themselves with cultural “phenotypes” to improve the accuracy of the interactional discriminations (McElreath, Boyd, and Richerson 2001). Thus, it is plausible that such groups came to prime the living-kinds module, for these traits are all highly diagnostic of biological species. Because the priming of this module would have had the positive adaptive consequences reviewed above, there was no selection to discourage it. In Sperber’s (1996) terms, species (and not ethnies) originally constituted the proper domain for the living-kinds module, but then ethnies also became part of its actual domain by satisfying the module’s input conditions. Because this had adaptive consequences, ethnic groups are now part of the living-kind module’s proper domain—even if they are not species or even races. Is the Ugly Duckling Hypothesis Robust? the ugly duckling compared with other proposals The Ugly Duckling hypothesis predicts that categories that look like a species (i.e., meet the brain’s “input criteria” of a species) will tend to be essentialized, especially when the perceptions of descent-based membership and category-based endogamy, in particular, are strong. A corollary is that inductive generalizations of nonobvious properties—which essentialist intuitions motivate—will be more easily made in categories that look like species. An alternative hypothesis posits a smooth entitativity continuum (Hamilton and Sherman 1996, Hamilton, Sherman, and Lickel 1998, Yzerbyt, Rocher, and Schadron 1997, Yzerbyt, Rogier, and Fiske 1998, Yzerbyt, Corneille, and Estrada 2001). The more a social group looks like the prototypical “entity”—a human individual—the more it is essentialized, because we essentialize human individuals. The constituents of a human—its organs or gil-white Are Ethnic Groups Biological “Species” to the Human Brain? F 533 cells—are all closely bunched together (proximity), they all die together if major organs cease to function (common fate), and they are divided into specialized, hierarchically organized functions in order jointly to contribute to the human’s survival and reproduction (structure).15 The more a social category has these properties, this argument goes, the more we will essentialize it. My work in Bulgan Sum does not support this hypothesis. My respondents appeared to process clans and ethnies in different ways. Despite some similarities between clans and ethnic groups, entitativity seems much higher for clans. The Bangyakhan clan members all know and interact closely with each other, migrate together, and live in a relatively small territory (compare this with the “Mongol” territory of the Republic of Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, parts of southern Siberia, and Chinese Turkestan). Besides, these clans have some structure, for they are composed of different exogamous patrilineages and are closely coextensive with the smallest administrative unit, called a brigade. So these clans rank higher than ethnies in entitativity if one accepts the privileged variable of “structure” in the proposal by Hamilton, Sherman, and Lickel (1998). Despite all this, however, essentialist thinking seems absent at the level of the clan but quite evident for the ethnie. It seems more plausible that essentialized categories are perceived as entities than that meeting the objective criteria of entitativity causes essentialism. Thus, to ask, as Hamilton and Sherman (1996:348) do, “When we think about the range of social groups that we encounter and perceive in everyday life, what is it that gives some of these groups more essence . . .?” is not the same as asking what makes groups (objectively) “entitative,” as they believe. Many groups that we do not essentialize (e.g., firms) are much better examples of entities than is the average ethnic group. And “races”, which we do essentialize (Hirschfeld 1996), are vast collections of individuals with virtually nothing in common. It is hard to think of a category less like an entity than a so-called race. I argue that the ultimate cause for essentializing ethnies but not clans is that norms cluster at ethnic but not at clan boundaries, so selection has favored essentialism of ethnies. But in terms of proximate causes (priming inputs), what is it that makes ethnic groups “good to essentialize”? Perhaps in Bulgan Sum endogamy is one of the key differences. Even though the Bangyakhan are highly endogamous as a clan, this is not a rule but a preference expressed at the individual level, and parents never interfere when children wish to marry someone in another clan or, indeed, in another Mongol “tribe.” The rule, for most, is that their children may marry any Mongol they please, but they may not marry a Kazakh. It could be that the endogamy rule, as opposed to the pattern, is better at priming the living-kinds module, 15. I have omitted “similarity” (originally proposed by Campbell 1958) because structure in fact demands internal differences and therefore similarity of constituents is not a hallmark of an entity—certainly not of a human one. promoting essentialist thinking at those cleavages where one may not—rather than typically does not—out-marry. The distinction between ultimate and proximate causes above is generally important and useful. Rothbart and Taylor (1992:21) argue that inalterability (the fact that membership is neither initially chosen nor changeable) and inductive potential (the idea that one member of the category is informative about all members) are what suggest a social category as an essentialized natural kind to human cognition. In species categories, I have argued, possession of the essence is necessary and sufficient to category membership, and the only way to acquire it is through biological descent. Thus, Rothbart and Taylor’s inalterability is, from this perspective, closely linked to reproduction and is primed by (1) descent-derived membership and (2) category-based endogamy. But inductive potential as such seems to play no promixate role in priming (i.e., activating) the living-kinds module. Otherwise, why the extreme, essentializing paranoia of the Nazis about untrustworthy “aliens” in their midst? The Weimar Jews were the product of several generations of acculturation to Germans. If inductive potential drives categorization, then it should have been difficult and counterintuitive to group the Weimar Jews as a naturalized category apart from Germans and imply that these were unknown “aliens,” because Weimar Jews were mostly very similar to Germans and for most purposes posed no risks of miscoordination. However, classing them as a “nature” apart proved regrettably easy for many. This is not an isolated case. Across the world, a medieval Chinese dynast likewise sought to eradicate an ethnic group that had become completely acculturated to and indistinguishable from the Chinese. In fact, many ethnic Chinese were killed in this genocide because the executioners could not always be sure and were ordered to kill when suspicious (Golden 1992). These and other examples suggest that inductive potential does not really drive categorization. Rather, social categories with normative endogamy and descent-based membership will be naturalized as having different, not-fully-knowable essences, which assumption then motivates our inductive generalizations. What this means is that inductive potential is an ultimate cause (a selection pressure shaping our brains over the eons) rather than a proximate cause (an input stimulus that activates a schema in the brain) of social-category essentialism. Novel environments can undermine the original utility or function of a cognitive adaptation because, in the new setting, what primes the adaptation no longer correlates with the evolutionarily relevant variables. This seems to occur regularly in the case of state structures with institutionally absorbed and culturally assimilated—but persistently endogamous and self-ascriptive—groups. Such state structures did not occur in the socially uncomplexified ancestral environment, where a group outside one’s endogamy boundary was almost certainly composed of strange foreigners. This explains the modern “mistake” of essentializing an acculturated group as “different” merely because it continues to marry within the group. Also absent in the ancestral environment were sharp 534 F current anthropology Volume 42, Number 4, August–October 2001 “racial” differences between neighboring groups (these are the product of modern migrations [cf. Hirschfeld 1996:13; van den Berghe 1987(1981)]). Norm conformism in the ancestral environment would have led to a landscape peppered with the self-ascriptive norm clusters that we now like to call ethnic groups. The fact of their norm differences explains why we essentialize them, but since neighbors were very similar in biological phenotype, why then are we apparently so prepared to essentialize “races”? As I have argued, members of different norm communities have resorted to marking themselves (with paint, dress, etc.) in order to broadcast membership. A recent model suggests that this adaptively improves efforts to identify members of one’s norm community and avoidance of strangers with whom interaction is costly because of miscoordination (McElreath, Boyd, and Richerson 2001). It is plausible, then, that natural selection acted on our psychology so that we interpret sharp differences in cultural phenotypic markers as signaling different essences. It is also plausible that dramatic differences in skin color, hair type, etc.—which would have been absent between neighbors in the ancestral environment but are common today because of modern migrations, colonialism, etc.—are interpreted by our brains as ethnic diacritics. In other words, we essentialize races because we mistakenly “think” they are ethnic groups. We thus process “races” as ethnies even though not by the longest stretch of the imagination can they be characterized as representing norm or behavioral boundaries of any kind, which is the original reason for exapting the living-kinds module. (This point also undermines the idea that inductive potential promotes the naturalizing of a social category, for their is no inductive potential whatsoever to a racial category qua “race.”) Darwinians should recognize this as a “big-mistake” hypothesis for racialist thinking (the resulting pun is not really intended but entirely appropriate). Hirschfeld (1996) has demonstrated that biological phenotypic differences (i.e., “racial” differences) lead children to essentialize, and he acknowledges that this promotes inductive generalizations. However, he does not argue, as I do, that norms have anything—directly or indirectly—to do with it. On the contrary, he thinks that we have evolved machinery to essentialize “human kinds” even though, according to him, there is no clustering of cultural information that such essentialist inductions would help bootstrap (1996:21–22). In this context it is difficult to see what purpose or function social-category essentialism serves. Why did it evolve? I think that the essentialized processing of such categories as castes and feudal classes is again due to the fact that the proximate priming inputs satisfy our evolved adaptations to distinguishing ethnic groups. Castes and feudal classes are occupationally specialized and outwardly marked, have many norms particular to them, and, most important, have descent-based membership and normative endogamy. Even if such groups did not exist in the simple societies of the ancestral environment, when they arose in modern times they primed our species module—or the “ethnicity module” built on top of it. the ugly duckling cross-culturally It is not yet possible to assess the cross-cultural validity of the hypothesis because methodologies specific to investigating models of ethnic cognition have not been widely used. However, one can certainly evaluate existing data on their own terms. In a previous paper (GilWhite 1999) I examined the most important cases put forth to support the claim that an ethnic group is an instrumental association with chosen membership (which would deny all of the basic points argued here). These include the following ethnic transitions: Fur into Baggara in the Sudan (Haaland 1969), Pathan into Baluch in Swat, Pakistan (Barth 1969), and Kachin into Shan and other ethnic transitions in Burma (Leach 1977[1954]). For each of these, despite the (now famous) claims of their authors about people freely choosing to switch ethnies, the ethnographic data that they present show that no such transition takes place in the first generation (i.e., migrants from one ethnic community into another are considered until their deaths as members of the community of origin). The earliest any such transition can be completed is in the second generation, and this almost always requires a tie of blood through intermarriage. Other ethnographic cases of ethnic-group membership switches tell the same basic story: Dinka into Nuer in the Sudan (Kelly 1985), Gungawa into Hausa in Nigeria (Salamone 1974:109, 117, 236–37), Turkana into Samburu in Kenya (Hjort 1981), and Arabs into Malays in Malaysia (Nagata 1981). In the most thoroughgoing examination of such transitions, Levine (1987) documents in Nepal a great deal of instrumental accommodation by different groups of people to the caste and ethnic categories that best serve their interests in the sociopolitical environment in which they find themselves. But even in such a fluid place, Levine documents the following: (1) Many political manipulations and accommodations involve using labels that are only for outsiders or government officials; at the local level the ethnic distinctions remain intact, as do the patterns of normative endogamy that support them. (2) When genuine transitions from one ethnic category to another take place, these are typically not completed in political time-scales but usually require several decades and—most important—intermarriage. Furthermore, changes in caste or ethnic status very often lag considerably behind the political/residential/economic accommodations. Thus, for example, “Chetris may disapprove of marriages with lower castes and be pleased by caste fellows’ marriages with Thakuris, but there are recognized ways to integrate the offspring of intercaste unions. The rule given is that, after three generations of repeated intermarriages, the person is a full member of the caste group with whom the marriages occurred, whether lower or higher” (Levine 1987:81). The cross-cultural data are therefore apparently in harmony with the claim that normatively endogamous, self- gil-white Are Ethnic Groups Biological “Species” to the Human Brain? F 535 ascriptive groups with descent-based membership will promote the intuition that they possess a group nature or essence and that this essence cannot be acquired without ties of blood, perhaps not even without several generations of it. As one Kazakh informant put it to me, “It takes seven generations for the [foreign] blood to be cleaned.” The only case I have found in which ethnic switches occur without ties of blood is among the Kazakhs of Xinjiang, where the adoption of (often stolen) young children sufficed (Bessac 1965:378–79). However, my own in-depth work with Kazakhs from this general region reveals an intuitive cognition not inconsistent with the arguments presented here. One might object that this neglects the United States—perhaps a major exception (at one time, after all, it even had an official “melting pot” ideology). I readily admit that ethnic affiliation, for many U.S. citizens, is less salient than a national identity as Americans, and this points to the salutary effects that a consistent ideology promoted at the state level can have on the production of cultural models that supersede in part our native intuitions. But the history of the United States is not inconsistent with the hypothesis presented here. The relevant factors are, here, (1) the rampant intermarriage among the European ethnic groups, (2) the failure to keep alive ethnic norms to a significant degree (see Alba 1990 for both points), and (3) the absence of a clear, uniparental descent-rule for ethnic identity in cases of intermarriage (for the importance of this to the maintenance of boundaries, see Nave 2000). These three facts, in the light of the Ugly Duckling hypothesis, will be expected to produce just such a weakening of ethnic identity and a reformulation of a new ethnicity coincident with the new endogamy boundary (i.e., “whites”). Despite all this, the intuitions—such as they are—that American whites have about their European ethnicity nevertheless rely on “blood.” Americans who say that they are half Irish, onequarter Italian, and one-quarter Mexican are not explaining the degrees to which they have mastered these different cultures or choose to participate or affiliate with them but making a calculation based on the ethnicities of their grandparents. a better explanation for ethnic conflict? The most prominent psychological perspective on intergroup conflict has been social identity theory, which began by finding that people will discriminate against any out-group, however defined (even if it is “those who flipped ‘heads”’ versus “those who flipped ‘tails”’ [Tajfel 1970, Diehl 1990]). This has been interpreted as a general answer for the root of ethnic hatred and other forms of conflict. However, even supposing that this demonstrates a general tendency to discriminate against outgroups rather than an idiosyncrasy of the experimental setup (see Mummendey et al. 1992), it still leaves us with the question: why ethnic hatred and warfare but, for example, no architect/lawyer riots? Why don’t students from different universities attack each other with rocks and assault weapons and protest interuniversity marriages? Clearly, social categories are not all the same, and a purported bias against any and all out-groups cannot, by its very generality, explain why conflict should be so different across different kinds of group boundaries. The Ugly Duckling hypothesis can be the basis of a better explanation for why ethnic groups are unique. Let us provisionally accept that (1) ethnies are interactionalnorm groups, (2) people essentialize ethnies, and (3) ethnic membership is neither chosen nor alterable without subterfuge (lying about origins) because of ideologies that membership is a matter of descent. Now let us suppose further that people, inside their own group, are good at learning whom to trust. For example, I know that people inside my group who break in-group norms (break promises and contracts, are not shamed by the right things, etc.) are “bad” and should be avoided because interactions with them are costly. Now turn to the out-group: Members of the out-group are always violating my ingroup’s norms. From my perspective, their behavior is “wrong,” and therefore they are “bad” people because I will judge them with the same mechanism that judges norm breakers in the in-group. Being tolerantly cosmopolitan rather than ethnocentric confers no advantage on me because the costs of miscoordination with out-group ethnics are very similar to the costs of being cheated by coethnics who “should know better”—in either case attempted reciprocal interaction fails. Thus natural selection has favored my interpreting the fact that they break my norms as a moral lapse rather than a cultural difference. This means that my baseline attitude towards outgroup ethnics, in the best of times, is one of at least mild distrust. Since I essentialize them, I think that their “moral lapses” result from their corrupt nature, which cannot be helped. This stance is likely to make me slide in the direction of misunderstanding and hatred when the time comes to interpret the motivations of out-group members with whom I am in conflict. These mechanisms allow ethnic conflict to descend quickly into murderous hate, and the naturalization of the conflict can make it very stable. This account can also explain why the contact hypothesis has failed. This hypothesis states that contact between members of different racial, ethnic, or cultural groups fosters positive intergroup attitudes. However, empirical tests have found that contact achieves this end only when a long laundry list of joint conditions are met: “the contact must involve cooperative activities; the participants must have equal status; they must also be similar on nonstatus dimensions; they must hold no negative views of each other at the outset; the outcome of the interaction must be positive; and so on” (Miller and Prentice 1999:219; see Stephan 1985). In other words, experimental manipulations that meet all the above conditions improve intergroup attitudes—contact doesn’t. From the perspective of the Ugly Duckling hypothesis, this is not surprising. Contact, after all, reminds us that out-group members have the “wrong” norms and do the “wrong” things. 536 F current anthropology Volume 42, Number 4, August–October 2001 Conclusion The evidence from Mongolia supports the hypothesis that humans process ethnies as natural living kinds (theoretical considerations suggest that they do so at the “species” level). My Torguud subjects have a blood-based model for assigning individuals to ethnies. Beyond this, they consider such assignment to carry implications for ethnic category-based behavior even without any exposure to other members of their ethnic category, and they seem to believe that the ineffable “something” responsible for this is carried somehow “inside.” All of these parallel essentialist thinking in natural living kinds, suggesting that my subjects’ thinking about ethnies is not only primordialist but essentialist and that there is no difference between an ethnic group and a species from the point of view of the schemas that are primed to process them. Processing endogamous norm groups as species, I have argued, was adaptive in the ancestral environment because (1) it allowed us to learn a lot about out-groups in a very inexpensive way, in particular by making inductive inferences about nonobvious properties, and (2) it made possible processes of discrimination that prevented us from incurring the costs of coordination failure. The reason these benefits have been obtained specifically by processing these groups as species results from the fact that ethnies exhibit the most diagnostic features of species: group-based endogamy and descent-based membership. This made it easy for a blind evolutionary process to exapt a preexisting architecture by simply failing to discourage the priming by ethnies of the living-kinds module. This is not, I think, how we think of social categories in general but only how we think of those categories which, as in ethnies, exhibit the strongly diagnostic features of biological species, such as feudal classes and castes. Comments rita astuti London School of Economics, Houghton St., London WC2 2AE, U.K. (r.astuti@lse.ac.uk). 14 v 01 Gil-White’s article raises some very important and challenging issues. The overall project is to explain why so many people around the world make the metaphysical error of believing in essentialism. While entirely sympathetic in principle with this endeavour, I don’t think that the evidence presented takes us much closer to understanding why actors—unlike “constructivist” scholars—persist in essentializing the differences between human groups. Gil-White’s hypothesis is motivated by the straightforward evolutionary assumption that “domains important to our survival and reproduction in the past have probably selected for machinery specifically dedicated to processing the domain-relevant inputs.” Since the ability to distinguish between social groupings must have been important for past survival and reproduction, one may assume the existence of a “mental machinery specific to processing ethnies.” Furthermore, since in the ancestral environment humans organized themselves into groups which had all the salient and diagnostic characteristics of animal species (crucially, endogamy across norm boundaries), humans would process these groups as animal species. Doing so proved adaptive, and human brains capable of processing ethnic groups as species were thus selected. This may be a plausible story, although it is possible to sketch alternative evolutionary accounts (e.g., Hirschfeld 1997:75–78). However, such a story only generates the hypothesis that humans are endowed with a certain “mental machinery”; it crucially does not offer any evidence for the machinery’s existence. So, what evidence does Gil-White provide to support a nativist claim about the “panhuman proclivity of our psychological design” to essentialize “ethnies” in the manner of species? The evidence consists in the results of a questionnaire administered to a group of Torguud and Kazakh seminomadic pastoralists. Its formulation raises several methodological problems. First, the respondents were asked to reason about the ethnic identity of a child born of an interethnic marriage. This is puzzling, because if endogamy is what primes actors to perceive ethnic groups as animal species, intermarriage should be inconceivable. However, if intermarriage is conceivable (as Gil-White’s data show), it follows that actors do not define ethnic groups as animal species. Second, respondents were asked about the ethnic identity of a child born into one group but adopted and raised by another; but this is problematic, since the participants were told that, rather than asked whether, the adopted baby would learn the customs and language of the adoptive group. The majority of Torguud participants reasoned that ethnic identity is fixed by birth rather than nurture and revealed that ethnic ascription carries with it the expectation of “innate potential.” These results are very interesting, but they do no more than provide an ethnographic example of essentialist reasoning about ethnic groups. Similar examples can be found elsewhere in the anthropological literature, and Gil-White is thus certainly right in claiming that his results are not idiosyncratic. However, his claim that “all over the world” people base ethnic ascriptions on blood much more than enculturation is more contentious and is disproved by his own data: the same questionnaire applied to neighbouring Kazakhs shows a majority of respondents reasoning that ethnic identity is acquired performatively through enculturation. My own ethnographic (Astuti 1995a, b) and experimental work (based on a version of the adoption task devised by Solomon et al. [1996] and used also by Bloch, Solomon, and Carey [2001]) with the Vezo of Madagascar (Astuti 2001a) offers further robust evidence that ethnic and racial groups are not universally essentialized (for converging ethnographic evidence see, e.g., Fox 1987, Linnekin and Poyer 1990, Gow 1991, Bloch 1993, Carsten 1995). gil-white Are Ethnic Groups Biological “Species” to the Human Brain? F 537 Even incontrovertible evidence of cross-cultural universality would in any case be insufficient to prove GilWhite’s claim that human cognition is innately designed to process ethnies like animal species. As Carey notes (1995:270–71, with reference to Sperber’s [1994] and Atran’s [1994] claim that folk biology is a first-order cognitive module), the existence of cross-cultural universality in adults is not conclusive evidence for the existence of an innate domain-specific cognitive module, since universal convergence in adult knowledge could result from theory-building capacities applied to a world that, across cultures, provides consistent and convergent evidence; in other words, universal patterns among adults could quite plausibly be “constructed.” It follows that evidence of innate cognitive modules should be based on empirical studies of infant knowledge that emerge well before infants can conceivably have acquired it from the environment and appear to constrain the way infants learn. This is also the point of departure for Hirschfeld’s work on essentialist reasoning about race (1996), which GilWhite cites with approval. Hirschfeld bases his empirical work on children for the simple reason that no amount of cross-cultural evidence of adult reasoning would support his claim that humans are endowed with an innate predisposition to essentialize human kinds. Although Gil-White does not report work specifically with children, he does mention that his younger Kazakh informants (no age specified) claimed that ethnic identity is fixed at birth, by contrast with a majority of (adult) responses that were nurture-based. This raises the possibility that he has captured a significant moment in the construction of the adult theory out of early childhood intuitions that people are born to be what they are (see Astuti 2001b for findings along these lines about Vezo children). It also suggests that Gil-White will need to turn to the younger members of Mongol and Kazakh society to support his elegant albeit as yet just-so evolutionary story. scott atran Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich. 48106-1248, U.S.A. (satran@s.imap. itd.umich.edu). 30 iii 01 Cognitive anthropology’s demise as a major player in current anthropology owes, in part, to the superficiality of the psychological mechanisms employed to explain the cross-cultural patterns revealed in the pioneering studies of Berlin, Conklin, D’Andrade, Frake, Kay, Romney, and others. Analyses followed widespread views of minds as vast, amorphous neural networks with little content-specific, innate structure. Minds were seen as organized by all-purpose, domain-general mechanisms: similarity structures of perceptual attributes, contrastive features, binary oppositions. This afforded little insight into how minds form representations of the world or how individual minds causally link up in the populationwide distributions of representations (along with artifacts and behaviors generated by representations) that we call “culture.” Cognitive psychology today focuses more on domainspecific mechanisms than on general-purpose “intelligence.” These mechanisms presumably evolved over millions of years of biological and cognitive evolution to deal with specific recurrent problems in ancestral environments (“task demands”) such as recognizing inert objects (rocks), reducing biodiversity to manageable proportions (species), or anticipating agents (intentions of potential predators or prey). This “computational mind” consists of a variety of distinct information-processing devices. Each has a particular “content bias” that targets some particular domain of stimuli in the world (input sets): for example, rigid three-dimensional bodies that move by physical contact (mechanics), self-propelled actors that contingently coordinate interactions without physical contact (agency), or behaviors and appearances of nonhuman living kinds (species relations). The particular inferential structure of each domain-specific processor takes exemplars of the stimulus set episodically encountered in a person’s life and spontaneously projects these relatively fragmentary samples onto richly structured categories (output classes) of general relevance to our species (objects and kinds of folkphysics, folkpsychology, folkbiology, etc.). Hirschfeld (1996) has proposed a domain-specific “folksociology” based on groundbreaking experiments showing early development of race concepts in childhood. Gil-White amplifies and challenges Hirschfeld’s insights with preliminary cross-cultural data. Both researchers focus on a puzzle and problem of human existence: people everywhere aggregate into essentialized groups, such as racial and ethnic groups, whose apparent regularities are thought to be caused by some deep underlying nature unique to the group and not transparent from observation (perhaps even unknowable). People cognitively privilege essentialized groups as providing the most dependable or trustworthy context for forming and inferring beliefs about themselves and others and for taking life-enhancing collective action based upon those beliefs (mating, war, economic cooperation). The puzzle is that people willfully ignore massive evidence of biological or cognitive incoherence. The problem consists in the profound, wide-ranging consequences of this myopic aspect of our cognitive endowment for sociopolitical life. Mere belief in the group’s causal unity creates a “looping effect” (Hacking 1995) whereby people strive (or compel others) to conform to group norms and stereotypes. This brings causal coherence to a group where initially there was none. It promotes convergent behaviors and interactional discriminations among the in-group (normative endogamy, patriotic ideals) and generates reliability in behavioral predictions about one’s group relative to behaviors of members of other groups. The initially false or arbitrary presumption of a group essence makes adaptive sense. Our ancestors lived in an uncertain world of potential friends and enemies as “runaway social competition” made hominids their own worst predators (Al- 538 F current anthropology Volume 42, Number 4, August–October 2001 exander 1989). A self-reinforcing interactional bias would have fostered in-group convergence and cooperation. This would have reduced the risk, energy, and time involved in interacting with out-groups, which were more likely to contain potential enemies (or behaviors too noisy to be economically assessed as friend or foe). Ethnic exclusivity has an evolutionary downside: it biases interaction with out-groups toward enmity, increasing the risk of conflict and injury. On balance, benefits outweighed costs in ancestral environments. But in today’s rapidly interconnecting world, the survival value of exclusive ethnic groups—armed with more destructive power than any Pleistocene relative could imagine—is not apparent. Gil-White attributes the cognitive bias toward essentializing human kinds to an “ethnicity module” that he characterizes as an exaptation of what I have dubbed “the living-kind module” for species detection (Atran et al. 2001). Other essentialized human kinds—race, caste, class—are supposedly derivative. Once domain-specific mechanisms for discriminating and establishing normative group behavior were in place, any number of perceptible groupwide features could serve as input to the ethnicity module for marking ethnic boundaries. I find Gil-White’s evolutionary perspective compelling but doubt that humans evolved an ethnicity module that targets some real-world domain of “norms.” I suspect that essentialization of human groups by race is cognitively privileged—not because of an evolved “race module” or “cultural construction” but because (1) putative racial (and perhaps linguistic) characteristics readily meet minimum perceptual triggering conditions for firing the living-kind module (much as pornographic pictures meet minimal triggering conditions for firing sexual desire) and (2) species essentialization of human groups creates (through a looping effect) human kinds together with inferential means for making reliable predictions about them (if only as self-fulfilling prophecy). Norm markers for ethnic boundaries are culturally created and manipulated to trigger the living-kind module in certain contexts (much as erotica is created to manipulate sexual desire for advertising and other cultural ends). Derivative norm markers may be even more critical—and more “real”—for group differentiation than the normative behaviors they are supposed to signal. For some important markers there may be no underlying normative behavior or consensus to speak of, such as wearing coat and tie or reciting the Pledge of Allegiance or even (as our studies show) the Ten Commandments (Atran n.d.). michael banton The Court House, Llanvair Discoed, Chepstow NP16 6LX, U.K. (michael@banton.demon.co.uk). 18 iii 01 There are folk concepts of ethnic difference. Whether there can also be an analytical concept of ethnicity (one which those who follow Marvin Harris would call etic as opposed to emic) is still uncertain. There are folk concepts in law, as in the protections for members of ethnic minorities under Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In English law the question of whether the wearing of turbans by Sikhs was protected by statute gave rise to a definition of an ethnic community. That definition did not protect the wearing of dreadlocks by a Rastafarian, while its application to Roma/Gypsies, or “Travellers,” was complicated by the question of permanency of residence. The new European Union race directive refers, clumsily, to “persons of racial or ethnic origin.” In Greece, the home of the concept, many criteria are evoked as evidence for the reality of Greek ethnicity, yet Roger Just (1989:76) concluded that it was “a somewhat retrograde step that ethnicity should ever have entered into the analytical vocabulary of the social sciences.” Banks (1996:186) agrees that the concept “may not be out there in the world of social relations.” Gil-White shows that Mongols have a folk concept of u¨ ndesten which is maintained by the rule of endogamy, by the high exit cost incurred by anyone leaving the group, and by awareness of the proximity of Kazakhs as forming a group following a similar mode of living but with a different religion and language. He contends that members of the Mongol group cognize u¨ ndesten in an essentialist manner and that such cognition could serve an evolutionary function. It is difficult (as can be glimpsed in Gil-White 1999:801) to keep such an argument separate from the assumption that ethnic alignment must be something “out there in the world of social relations,” something with an objective reality that can be grasped by an analytical concept. At the heart of the problem is the multidimensionality of social groups. A given group may be distinguished by its members’ outward appearance, language, religion, ethnic origin, and other characteristics, including the sharing of norms emphasized by Gil-White or the minimal criteria of Tajfel’s experiments. Groups have to be maintained by human activity. Some of us have held that similar processes underlie the maintenance of different kinds of group, but that is not to deny the possible importance of differences in the material from which groups are constructed. Multidimensionality is one of the factors associated with the historical continuity of groups. The relative salience of particular characteristics and their influence upon actual relations varies from case to case. An analyst may also single out one dimension for its relevance to some theory. Multidimensionality also bears on the question, raised by Gil-White, of why ethnies get racialized even when there are no sharp phenotypic differences. The concept of racialization was introduced in English (Banton 1977: 18) as a name for a mode of categorization whereby nations and peoples were called races, with the implication that identifying them as races opened up a superior way of understanding what went on. If the language of race was used to identify a group, it was racialized; the criteria were emic (in Harris’s sense). Since then its application has been extended to circumstances in which a way of representing groups is believed gil-white Are Ethnic Groups Biological “Species” to the Human Brain? F 539 to have the same function as use of the vocabulary of race. This rests on the analyst’s belief in the importance of a racial dimension as something etic, but it is difficult to justify this when the people in question use only proper names to identify those allegedly racialized. So many very different kinds of intergroup relations get classified as ethnic conflict (another folk concept!) that it is unprofitable to seek a comprehensive explanation (Banton 2000). Gil-White’s hypothesis might form part of an explanation of some of them. His very stimulating contribution touches on a variety of issues that deserve separate consideration. pascal boyer College of Arts and Sciences, Washington University, St. Louis, Mo. 63130, U.S.A. (pboyer@artsci.wustl.edu). 6 iv 01 Gil-White’s excellent argument may require some empirical and theoretical additions. First, as he points out, his own questionnaire-based studies are only a first step. This is a domain where people’s behaviour is mainly driven by implicit (and not always consciously accessible) assumptions, so we will need experimental studies (of the kind pioneered by Hirschfeld [1996]) of implicit assumptions and their developmental trajectory (see, e.g., Astuti 2001a, Bloch, Solomon, and Carey 2001). These, on the whole, confirm that intuitive, essentialist assumptions drive inferences about some social groups, although there remain many details to fill in. Second, the cognitive underpinnings of essentialist inferences should be made more specific. Human minds can be reasonably described as comprising a number of functionally distinct, domain-specific inference engines, each of which focuses on particular kinds of information picked up from an environment and produces specific kinds of inferences (Cosmides and Tooby 1994). Although the delivered inferences may be consciously accessible, the inferential processes are generally not. A single inference engine can be activated by two ontologically distinct domains (we interpret the structural features of artefacts as connected to their function and do the same for animal body-parts, although animals and artefacts are not in the same category) and a single object can activate different inference engines (interaction with one’s children activates parenting programmes but also an intuitive psychology to make sense of what they do, an intuitive physics to predict their collisions with objects, etc.). Different inference engines may be activated in the interpretation of a single input: a sudden noise may activate two incompatible interpretations, as the result of an agent’s behaviour or a purely mechanical event. It is probable that ethnic groups too trigger several parallel inference engines in this way. As Gil-White suggests, a causal-essence inference engine (probably evolved to afford quick induction about living kinds) is activated whenever people represent a group as descentbased and endogamous. These are two crucial input conditions (generally true of living things) that yield inferences about an undefined yet causally powerful underlying quality or essence, its similarity in exemplars of the same category, and its immutability. But the causal-essence inference engine also delivers potential inferences that do not match actual features of ethnic groups. For instance, it suggests that intercategory reproduction is impossible when it is clear that it is perfectly possible to mate across ethnic lines—indeed, that exogamy is as much a cause as a consequence of the groups’ stability and cohesiveness. Conversely, many common intuitions about ethnic groups are delivered not by the causal-essence inference engine but by others. Representing “impure” and despised castes or groups as different by virtue of birth requires some essentializing, but then people also have the intuitions that (a) members of these groups carry some dangerous, invisible substance (“pollution”), (b) contact with them can transmit that substance, and (c) the amount or frequency of contact is irrelevant. These inferences are typical of what could be called the contagion-contamination system, an inference engine that produces strong feelings of aversion to (even very remote) contact with likely sources of pathogens (decayed corpses, dirt, excrement, etc.). As Rozin, Haidt, and McCauley (1993) have shown, easy acquisition of such disgust reactions is vital to generalists like rats and humans. More generally, pathogen avoidance is made very efficient by the three intuitions listed above. In some contexts, some groups can be described in a way that activates this system, and people spontaneously draw such inferences about them. But this is not (or not only) causal essentialism. Finally, humans are extremely good at using coalitional affiliation to carry out collaborative endeavours by efficiently allocating trust among cooperators (Kurzban 1999). Some consequences of having ethnic categories may be computed by this coalitional system. For instance, after being attacked by one member of the group one can retaliate by attacking another member. This elementary intuition is easily acquired by children the world over and is one of the conditions of coalitional affiliation. Such intuitions are not intrinsically about essence-based groups, since they work very well in the maintenance of small coalitions in any group. Different historical circumstances may make particular kinds of inferences more efficient in the explanation of a particular interaction. Thus people may well entertain several not necessarily congruent potential representations of the ethnic landscape at once, though GilWhite is right to suggest that a causal-essence version is usually most salient. susan a. gelman Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich. 48106, U.S.A. (gelman@umich.edu). 2 iv 01 Gil-White’s piece on essentialism provides arguments and data that demand our attention. That essentialism, 540 F current anthropology Volume 42, Number 4, August–October 2001 so common among middle-class U.S. children and adults, is also found among the Torguud pastoralists of western Mongolia is an important empirical result. People in both cultures predict that innate potential is more powerful than environmental influences (Gelman and Wellman 1991, Hirschfeld 1996, Springer 1996) and appear to link essences to something internal and hidden (Diesendruck, Gelman, and Lebowitz 1998). Commonalities in essentialism across these different groups place constraints on the crucial question of where essentialism comes from. The data further undermine the position that “natural kind concepts ...[are] self-conscious and cultivated intellectual achievements” (Fodor 1998:154). Gil-White insightfully notes that not all social categories are essentialized (e.g., at this point in the United States, race is essentialized but occupation is not). His proposed explanation is that we have evolved in such a way that we process ethnic groups as if they were species when two priming conditions are met: that the groups are endogamous and that they are descent-based. I suspect that endogamy cannot be the whole story. For one thing, endogamy cannot be a priming condition for essentialism unless it is perceived and understood. In this regard, I suspect that children may essentialize social categories even before they acquire knowledge of endogamy. (More generally, strong claims about the priming inputs for essentialism will require a closer look at people’s beliefs about these factors.) A second point is that, among the social groups that Gil-White examines, endogamy is confounded with several other factors, including immutability of group membership, sharpness of group boundaries, inductive potential, possession of numerous obvious similarities, and (belief in) possession of numerous nonobvious similarities. The essentialized (Mongol-Kazakh) distinction apparently can be characterized by all of these properties; the nonessentialized (Bangyakhan-Beelinkhen) distinction apparently can be characterized by descent-based membership alone. Thus, we have a cluster of properties nearly all of which intercorrelate and any one of which could be priming essentialism. Third, there would appear to be counterexamples to Gil-White’s prediction. Gender is marked by neither endogamy nor descent-based membership, yet clearly it is essentialized (Gelman, Collman, and Maccoby 1986, Taylor 1996). Similarly, some people essentialize traits such as intelligence or shyness (Heyman and Gelman 2000) although they are not endogamous. Another problematic example is caste essentialism in India. Using a switched-at-birth task, Mahalingam (1998) finds that upper-caste adults essentialize caste differences but lowcaste adults do not. They tend instead toward social constructivist sorts of accounts, despite the presumed descent-based membership and endogamy of caste. In these cases, we need to look for an explanation outside of normative endogamy or descent-based membership. And if we need to look elsewhere to explain gender, traits, and caste, then it becomes plausible that we need to look elsewhere to explain essentializing of ethnic groups as well. The evolutionary/biological component to the model, though artfully presented, seems unnecessary to account for the data. Although all cognition is surely “in the brain,” the worry is that this approach may preclude close examination of relevant proximate factors, including language. An example of my concern is Gil-White’s discussion of Atran et al.’s (1997) finding that people with two markedly different cultures (U.S. and Itzaj Maya) favor species-level inductive generalizations despite radical differences in knowledge base. Gil-White concludes that this result “supports the hypothesis that the living-kinds or ‘folkbiology’ module is a human universal.” However, what fails to receive mention is that the species level is also the most inclusive level to receive monolexemic names (e.g., “trout” vs. “rainbow trout”) in both languages (Coley et al. 1999). The crosscultural commonality may reflect a preference for induction from names of a given sort rather than an innate module (see Gelman et al. 2000 for further discussion). Gil-White has numerous insightful things to say about issues of measurement, two of which are particularly crucial for studying essentialism: (1) Identification procedures are distinct from categorization (see also Diesendruck and Gelman 1999, Gelman and Medin 1993, Kamp and Partee 1995). (2) Implicit measures may yield different results from explicit, metacognitive judgments. This latter point raises a host of vexing questions: How can we know when we are studying conscious versus intuitive theories? Which sorts of theories reflect more stable, more powerfully predictive, or more representative beliefs? How coherent or consistent are people’s belief systems (see also Rosengren, Johnson, and Harris 2000)? One of the great strengths of Gil-White’s article is that it generates a fertile set of predictions and conceptual contrasts. Further tests of the theory are certain to yield rich insights into the nature of folk essentialism. david l. hamilton, steven j. sherman, and jeremy d. sack Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara, Calif. 93106, U.S.A. (Hamilton and Sack)/Department of Psychology, Indiana University, Bloomington, Ind. 47405, U.S.A. (Sherman) (hamilton@ psych.ucsb.edu). 10 iv 01 Gil-White begins by asking, “What is a group?” Our work has also pursued an answer to that question, and, as with Gil-White, the actual concern is “What is a group as perceived by observers?” We have, however, focused on different aspects of the question. Gil-White’s primary concern is why ethnic groups are perceived as species. Our research has focused on when an aggregate is perceived as a group, how, and with what consequences, and our analysis has emphasized perceived entitativity. Entitativity is the unity, coherence, bondedness among individuals that causes them to be perceived as a group. Our research (see Hamilton and Sherman 1996, Hamilton, Sherman, and Lickel 1998, Hamilton, Sherman, and gil-white Are Ethnic Groups Biological “Species” to the Human Brain? F 541 Castelli 2001, Hamilton, Sherman, and Rodgers n.d., Sherman, Hamilton, and Lewis 1999) has investigated both the antecedents of perceiving entitativity (the cues used to infer that an aggregate is a group) and the consequences of perceiving entitativity (greater integrative processing of information about the group, effects on memory and judgment, perceptions of collective responsibility among group members). We have referred to groups’ falling along an “entitativity continuum” reflecting variation in the extent of their perceived “groupness” (Hamilton, Sherman, and Lickel 1998). Lickel et al. (2000) have obtained ratings of 40 groups documenting that their “groupness” varies widely. In addition, Lickel et al.’s analyses have identified five distinct types of groups: intimacy groups (family, friends, street gang), task groups (committee, jury, co-workers), social categories (women, blacks, Jews), loose associations (people living in the same neighborhood, people who like classical music), and transitory groups (people waiting at a bus stop). These types differ not only in degree of perceived entitativity (decreasing across types as listed) but also in the properties (interaction among members, common fate, similarity, etc.) that contribute to that perception. Gil-White argues that perceiving ethnies as species serves important evolutionary functions. We too believe that the mental representation of group types serves important functions, but we focus on social-motivational functions and have suggested that the three main group types (intimacy, task, and social category) serve the needs for affiliation, achievement, and social identity, respectively (Hamilton, Sherman, and Castelli 2001). Of particular relevance here is the fact that social categories are only one of several types of groups about which perceivers have well-developed cognitive representations. Moreover, whereas essentialist thinking is most likely to be applied to social categories (or at least some of them; we don’t think about the “essence” of, for example, a social club or a committee), they are lower than both intimacy and task groups in degree of perceived entitativity. Thus, the two concepts are distinct. These differences become more apparent when we consider their implications for group stereotypes. Some researchers (Rothbart and Taylor 1992, Yzerbyt, Rocher, and Schadron 1997) have proposed that stereotyping often includes endowing a social category with some essence that justifies its differential perception. These applications of an essentialist approach are considerably broader than Gil-White’s analysis, but the viability of this approach requires specification of the conditions under which the idea of an underlying essence will guide people’s perceptions of a group (Hamilton, Sherman, and Rodgers n.d.). Another complexity is the following: A family is a prime example of an intimacy group as perceived by our subjects and is very high in perceived entitativity. It would also be high in essentialism and seemingly meets Gil-White’s criteria for being perceived as a natural kind. Yet sweeping (stereotypic?) generalizations about members of a family seem intuitively less likely than broad characterizations of social categories. People seem more comfortable making generalizations about what blacks are like than about what members of the Filan family are like. The inductive potential afforded by a group that is high in both entitativity and essentialism can, as in this example, be rather limited. Analyses of essentialism may be quite useful in understanding group perception, at least under some conditions, and Gil-White’s application to the perception of ethnies as species is laudable and thought-provoking. However, this is a narrower and more focused analysis than is required to answer the more general question of a how a group is perceived to be a group. Entitativity is a more general concept than essentialism, and recent research indicates important distinctions between them (Hamilton, Sherman, and Rodgers n.d.). Identifying the role of essentialist conceptions in perceptions of groups, the conditions that promote them, and the boundary conditions on their use remain important matters for future investigation.1 tim ingold Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen AB24 3QY, Scotland, U.K. (tim.ingold@abdn.ac.uk). 28 iii 01 Gil-White’s argument is so manifestly absurd that I cannot believe it is meant to be taken seriously. It must be a spoof. As such, it is a brilliant parody of what currently parades under the banner of evolutionary psychology. We human beings, evolutionary psychology tells us, are universally equipped with mental machinery, hard-wired in the brain—processing devices or “modules” that organize our perception of the world. These modules have been constructed to design specifications established by natural selection as adaptations to the conditions of life faced by our early ancestors and transmitted across the generations as a stable “biological endowment.” But the conditions encountered by people today differ markedly from those under which the panhuman mental architecture originally evolved. Hence a module adapted to process perceptual inputs from one source may be “primed” by inputs from another, quite different source—so long as these happen to be inputs of a kind the module can handle. These latter inputs, then, will be dealt with in much the same way as the former, yielding analogous representations. For example, in a world where people are distinguished by divergent patterns of customary behaviour, observations of human variation will be processed by the module originally designed to process observations of variation among living things. This module is constructed in such a way as to group living things into natural kinds, each endowed with a species-specific essence. Thus people will come to be similarly categorized, as ethnic groups akin to species. 1. Preparation of this comment was supported in part by National Institute of Mental Health Grant MH-40058. 542 F current anthropology Volume 42, Number 4, August–October 2001 This argument embodies several assumptions. First, there is an identifiable “essence” common to all human beings. In evolutionary psychology, it is commonly denoted by the venerable concept of “human nature.” Second, this essence is an internal property of the individuals that carry it. It is “in the genes” and thus to be distinguished from their outwardly visible or “phenotypic” characteristics. Third, for every human life-cycle it is given from the start, as a legacy from our shared evolutionary past, and remains immune to the historical circumstances that the person encounters in the course of his or her development in an environment. Consequently, fourth, it is passed on from generation to generation by descent. Now, these four assumptions are precisely those that, according to advocates of evolutionary psychology, have been built by natural selection into the cognitive machinery by which people the world over perceive living beings (including fellow humans). Evolutionary psychologists are convinced that the belief in an internal, inherited and context-independent species essence is part of an evolved cognitive adaptation in humans. Yet this very belief is axiomatic to evolutionary psychology itself. Seeking an essentialist account of human nature, evolutionary psychologists have set themselves the task of trying to discover what is universal to human beings. And what they have discovered is that all humans are essentialists! In effect, evolutionary psychology has constructed humanity in its own image. Gil-White astutely mimics the stylistic devices that evolutionary psychologists habitually use to cover up the circularity of their thinking. Here are a few rules for anyone wishing to play the same game: First, market your theory under the label of a familiar just-so story. Thus we have the “Ugly Duckling” hypothesis. Second, make yourself out to be pretty smart, easily able to outwit the simpletons among whom your research is being carried out, whose reasoning is allegedly swayed by their evolved intuitions. In one passage, Gil-White perfectly captures this swaggering self-confidence. Describing an attempt to trip up one of his key informants as a strategy for revealing the intuitive basis of the latter’s thinking, he writes, “I was very excited . . . but instead showed myself mockingly upset. ‘Tsoloo, you lied to me,’ I said with a wink and a smile.” Whom is he winking and smiling at? Not at the unfortunate Tsoloo, with whom he pretends to be upset. He is winking and smiling at us, his presumed readers, fellow conspirators in the game of evolutionary psychology. The subliminal message is “We know, because we can discriminate between people’s conscious theories and the intuitive outpourings that reveal what we are really after, namely, ‘the design of the human brain.”’ Third, to avoid being caught out by your opponents, who might otherwise observe that your own thinking is subject to the very unreflecting intuitions you attribute to others, cover your tracks with meaningless but apparently technical jargon. Gil-White offers a priceless example of the genre: “After the emergence of the conformist adaptation, the ancestral environment became populated with more or less well-defined, discontinuous norm clumps.” The final and most important rule, of course, is to ignore all evidence that does not fit your hypothesis. If you are a species essentialist, why bother with evidence? One or two cases suffice to prove a universal. Gil-White satirizes the point, perhaps unintentionally, with reference to the work of Atran and his colleagues. They claim to have shown that people of “two very widely divergent cultures” privilege the species level when making inductive inferences. This, it is suggested, “supports the hypothesis that the living-kinds or ‘folkbiology’ module is a human universal.” The suggestion is ludicrous, since if it takes only two positive instances to confirm the existence of a universal, then by the same token it would take only one negative instance to refute it. There is, indeed, abundant ethnographic evidence that in many societies persons and organisms are not identified by fixed, inner attributes. They are identified, rather, by their positions vis-a`-vis one another in unfolding fields of relationships. For evolutionary psychologists, such modes of identification are simply beyond comprehension. “Ordinary folk,” writes Gil-White, “are not good anthropologists. . . . Quite to the contrary, they are naive essentialists.” I am not sure whether these remarks are to be taken literally or tongue-in-cheek. Perhaps we should respond with a wink and a smile. We know that the people among whom we work are, invariably, far from naı¨ve and that we have to struggle to match the sophistication with which they understand the world around them. But evolutionary psychologists are species essentialists to the core, and the naivety of their sociological and scientific outlook occasionally beggars belief. Ironically, they are prey to just the kinds of fallacies that they (mistakenly) attribute to ordinary people. For that very reason, as Gil-White intimates, they do not make good anthropologists. One only has to read this paper to see why. david d. laitin Department of Political Science, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif. 94305-2044, U.S.A. 12 iii 01 Gil-White here addresses a fundamental problem that faces all students of ethnicity: given the weak relationship between blood and ethnicity, what accounts for the powerful popular beliefs that this relationship is strong and that ethnicity is natural? The phenomenon to be explained might be called “everyday primordialism” (Fearon and Laitin 2000). Gil-White’s provocative thesis is that the prevalence of everyday primordialism is an example of a human Darwinian adaptation of a “machinery” that has us all coding ethnies as if they were species. Two bits of data in the paper, however, diminish the cogency of this thesis. First, in his questionnaire administered to Torguud subjects, Gil-White asks a hypothetical about the offspring of a Kazakh father and a Mongol mother. It seems that every respondent accepted the terms of the question—that is to say, none refused to gil-white Are Ethnic Groups Biological “Species” to the Human Brain? F 543 accept the premise of the question by saying that it was against nature even to imagine that a Kazakh and a Mongol would have a common offspring. Surely some would have if asked about the offspring of a giraffe father and an elephant mother. Second, not all respondents were essentialists; essentialism existed in different degrees among them. GilWhite’s most trusted informant turned out to be a closet primordialist (believing capacity for magic to be inherited), but even he thought that many cultural characteristics were learned, and by implication the predictions you could make about a Mongol child raised by Kazakhs would not be nearly as good as those made about Mongols raised by Mongols. Again the adaptation of speciesthinking for ethnies is not quite perfect. In the case of the swan in The Ugly Duckling, as recounted by GilWhite, in the end it proves itself to be a genuine swan, not an almost-duck that has retained an innate capacity to do perhaps one unique swanlike thing. Granted some power to the species analogy (after all, everyday primordialist beliefs that ethnic essences exist somewhere inside people and that they emerge spontaneously are powerfully illustrated in this paper), is there another way to make sense of Gil-White’s data? I would suggest that he underestimates the gains from trade (in goods and in wives) between ethnic groups. The transaction costs of such long-distance trade are high, given the difficulty of knowing the honesty of any particular agent of a foreign ethnie. The barefooted empiricist strategies of ordinary people for characterizing the “other” lend themselves to generalizations that are resolutely primordialist. While some or even many people will see these group characteristics as species-like, it is not necessary for all to do this or for anyone to accept the full consequences of the analogy (indeed, the existence of intermarriage defies these consequences). If all humans wanted to maximize their chances of honest and understandable transactions, they would marry and trade only within their ethnic group. But there are considerable gains from trading, even if it means knowing less than one would like about the character of the person one is dealing with. One way to reduce transaction costs is to engage in a form of species-analogizing (see Fearon and Laitin 1996). Species analogizing, because it is useful, has a powerful grip on the human imagination, but it is unevenly distributed and breaks down in key areas (such as the possibility of marriage or the allowance of full assimilation after seven generations). It need not be transmitted across generations as a Darwinian cultural trait; rather, it is a rational response to the problem of asymmetric information when there are gains to trade. One test of Gil-White’s Darwinian approach in comparison with the more rationalist approach I am suggesting would be to examine whether everyday primordialism is constant over time. My surmise (based on an ordinary-language exposition of the term “identity” performed by Fearon [2000] but also consistent with Gellner’s [1998:20] theory of nationalism) is that the rigid rules of ethnic categorization that seem so obvious in today’s world are fairly recent inventions. In the era when religious membership was a hegemonic social category, transactions across the religious divide allowed for different modes of addressing asymmetric information. Ethnicity and rules of ethnic descent may therefore have played a far less prominent role in the way people thought about others. If the salience of everyday primordialism is variable over time, as I conjecture it has been, the case for Darwinian selection will be less strong. My counterinterpretation of Gil-White’s data has at least one important observable implication, and this concerns the issue of agency. Gil-White writes that “natural selection acted on our psychology so that we interpret sharp differences in cultural phenotypic markers with different essences.” Although he argues that his position is consistent with Barth’s, there is a major difference. If this proclivity for essentializing ethnic difference has been selected for, why do ethnic entrepreneurs need to expend such effort policing the boundaries of their groups and seeking to humiliate those who violate those boundaries, as, for example, in the “Romeo and Juliet” legend?1 Everyday primordialism requires work. Giraffes need no policing to restrain them from seeking to pass for or mate with elephants. The varied distribution of essentialist beliefs over space and time and the need for vigilant policing of ethnic boundaries lead me to doubt Gil-White’s thesis that the essentializing of ethnic others is built into the machinery of human evolutionary adaptation. ma rong Institute of Sociology and Anthropology, Peking University, Beijing 100871, People’s Republic of China (marong@pku.edu.cn). 2 iv 01 Gil-White’s article provides an insightful review of the literature on ethnic categorizing in anthropology and psychology along with experimental interview data from the Torguud Mongol area to demonstrate that ethnies are essentialized as “natural kinds” such as species. The argument sounds plausible, but there are several points that need to be clarified. First, it can be accepted that the two “most diagnostic features of ‘species’ [are] group-based endogamy and descent-based membership.” But in comparing “ethnies” to “species” it must be pointed out that human groups are different from “natural kinds” such as animals, birds, or fish, which, in general, cannot mate and have offspring (with very few exceptions, such as the horse and donkey) as human groups certainly can. Endogamy is a regulation established by human norms and not restricted by natural essences. Any ordinary herdsman or farmer can tell the difference. My field research in Inner Mongolia and Tibet (where there is much intermarriage) indicates that recognizing “ethnies” as “species” is not precisely the 1. Who pays the costs of policing in ethnic boundary maintenance and why are problems not easily solved. For an attempt to address them from a game-theoretic viewpoint, see Laitin (1995). 544 F current anthropology Volume 42, Number 4, August–October 2001 way local residents think. Therefore, the argument about the two diagnostic features does not support the point that ethnies are species. Secondly, the classification of species in the natural world is processed not on a single plane (as different columns in a table) but as a “tree” with species, subspecies, etc., as branches whose diagnostic features distinguish them from each other on the same level or between levels. Classifying human groups is also complicated, with races, ethnic groups, subgroups, clans, and families, depending on the different terms people use. Considering “species” and “ethnies” similar categories while ignoring this complexity is simplifying the issue. Third, although we are still improving our knowledge of species in the natural world and modifying systematic botany and zoology, there is usually expert consensus on categorizing, and the experts’ conclusions are accepted by society. Categorizing human ethnic groups is complicated by their artificial aspects. There are many stages in the continuum of group identity from family to humankind, and ethnic groups may be placed at different points on this continuum under different conditions. For example, Mongolians are categorized into several ethnic groups in the Republic of Mongolia but as one group in China. Officially, there are 56 “ethnic groups” in today’s China, but there were over 200 groups applying to be identified as “ethnic minorities” in the 1950s. The present 56 ethnic groups were the results of the recognition process established by the government in the 1950s, and there are still some groups that are not recognized as separate ethnic groups and are fighting for recognition (e.g., the “Blue Dressing” in Guizhou [cf. Fei 1988: 164–67]). As with other terms for classifying human groups such as “nation,” there are also local types in different parts of the world (Smith 1991:11). Fourth, ethnic groups change much more easily and more rapidly over time than species. Some groups have disappeared and some have emerged in the space of several generations, while the evolution of species took thousands of years. Besides, members of a species cannot change their membership from one species to another, but members of ethnic groups can and do. There have been many cases in contemporary China in which people changed their “ethnic status,” usually from Han majority to a minority, in order to receive the benefits (exemption from “family planning,” privileges in school and job recruitment, etc.) that the Chinese government offers to ethnic minorities. Gil-White presents data from his field studies in Mongolia as evidence to support his hypothesis. Several points need further discussion: (1) Religion plays a very important role in group identification. This point has been made repeatedly in the literature on ethnicity (e.g., intermarriages occurred mainly within three religious groups in Rhode Island [Kobrin and Goldscheider 1978]). The distance between Mongols and Kazakhs is created not only by an ethnic boundary but also by a religious boundary (Tibetan Buddhist/Muslim). Religion is more important and should be used to explain the ethnic boundary. There are many intermarriages between ethnic groups that are Muslim (Uygur, Kazakh, Kirgiz, Tajik) but few between Mongolian and Muslim groups in Xinjiang. (2) No explanation is given for the reported difference in ethnic categorizing between older and younger generations. If we consider the political/ideological environments in which they grew up, the picture becomes clearer. The older generation grew up with the communist ideology that class was more essential than ethnicity. The younger generation grew up under a new nationalism that strongly emphasizes the essences of ethnies. (3) “Something inside” is the term used to describe the essence of an ethnic group by the respondents in Gil-White’s study, but what is this “inside” exactly? The capacity for casting curses is not a general example for examining “essences,” because Mongolians and Tibetan Buddhists believe in curses but other ethnic groups (such as Han Chinese, Confucianists) may not. Blood ancestry can be traced, but the “essential difference” of Weimar Jews was only the opinion of the Nazis, not a general or universal opinion, and cannot be used to support the “Ugly Duckling” hypothesis. Finally, there are differences in norms between ethnic groups, but they also have many norms in common. Norms and behaviors may be different but not “wrong” or “bad.” The spirit of Confucianism is that all groups can be taught norms and everyone is born good. The great success of the Chinese dynasties was the acceptance of the Confucianist norms by frontier “barbarians” who were never considered essentially “different.” The world is diverse, and a general conclusion may be reached only after careful study. The Ugly Duckling is a bedtime story and cannot serve as a scientific hypothesis. myron rothbart and marjorie taylor Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, Eugene, Ore. 97403, U.S.A. (mickroth@oregon. uoregon.edu). 29 iii 01 Gil-White has given us a wide-ranging, thought-provoking paper. We particularly appreciate the careful descriptions of the answers provided by Mongolian respondents to questions probing essentialism. However, we disagree with Gil-White’s view that humans have evolved a mental module dedicated to processing information about species-level categories. We have problems with (1) the characterization of this type of processing as modular, (2) the rationale that it would be adaptive for ethnies to be processed by such a module, and (3) the view that essentialist thinking is determined by the activation of the module rather than by social beliefs and social context. First, although a module can be posited without requiring that all nine of Fodor’s (1983) original criteria for modularity be met (Baron-Cohen 1995), at a minimum “module” suggests that the processing of the input cannot be influenced by the person’s knowledge or beliefs (i.e., informational encapsulation) and that it is rapid, gil-white Are Ethnic Groups Biological “Species” to the Human Brain? F 545 automatic, and unconscious. Does Gil-White really want to make these claims about the processing of ethnies? Second, the justification for the adaptive value of processing ethnies as species is weak. Gil-White focuses on the costs of coordinating between groups that “play the ‘games’ of social life” differently and argues that it is adaptive to avoid social interaction with out-group members. However, it is possible to argue that the exact opposite behavior, seeking out such interactions, could be highly adaptive. Out-group members offer new ideas and contrasting perspectives—exactly the type of input that reduces the likelihood of bad decisions associated with insular processing (e.g., groupthink) and that can promote technological and cultural innovation. Historical analysis indicates that creative productivity tends to cluster in periods and places in which there is sufficient ethnic diversity to encourage cross-fertilization of ideas and beliefs (e.g., Greece in the 5th century b.c., Florence in the 15th century, Paris in the 19th century). According to Simonton (1999:213), “the mere exposure to different lifestyles and divergent values enables individuals to expand the range and originality of their ideational variations.” Third, Gil-White’s focus on ethnicity as the basis for “species”-like essentialism is misguided for several reasons: (1) it focuses on the reality—rather than the perception—of group boundaries and inductive potential; (2) it views essentialism as all-or-none rather than as continuous (even though his Mongolian data seem to suggest the latter); (3) it fails to recognize the dynamic nature of social perception, wherein the essentialist view of a given group can increase or decrease in strength depending on changes in social context; and (4) by placing so much weight on endogamy and descent as determinants of essentialism, it fails to recognize that the strength of essentialist perception for a given target group can vary both across different groups of perceivers and from individual to individual. Gil-White argues that ethnies are most likely to be viewed as species because of endogamy, descent-based membership, and within-group behavioral similarity, which represent surface similarities to species. Although race does not neatly fit these criteria, Gil-White realizes that race is often strongly essentialized and therefore concludes that race is mistaken for ethnicity. Clans, on the basis of his Mongolian data, are not considered ethnies and not essentialized. On the other hand, caste and class can be essentialized, again presumably because of their mistaken similarity to ethnies. We find this logic tortured. Moreover, we view this attempt to identify which groups will and will not activate the “species module” as overly narrow and static. It ignores the possibility that under the appropriate social conditions, for example, clans might well be essentialized and social classes not. If severe and extended conflict developed between the clans over, say, grazing territory, would not the changing intergroup conflict lead to deep, hostile attributions that would also be essential in their character? Essentialism can take place at the dyadic, family, clan, class, gender, ethnic, or national level, and we view it as a mistake to restrict it to one or a few types of social categories. We continue to believe that two factors strongly related to essentialism are perceived unalterability and perceived inductive potential, both of which are powerfully influenced by social beliefs and context. Because of the boundaries and barriers associated with group membership, descent-based categorization, ceteris paribus, is more likely to be essentialized than others, but again the perceived homogeneity/inductive potential of the group varies as a function of individual and group beliefs. Gil-White uses the example of the Weimar Jews as evidence against the argument of inductive potential as a causal factor. In our view, inductive potential is itself a complex function of social reality and social perception, not simply a product of descent-based categorization. The reality of Western European Jewry was extremely diverse, including Bolsheviks and bankers, highly assimilated German scientists and impoverished medieval Polish religionists. It was Nazi ideology that imposed unity on this diversity by ascribing to Jews, among other things, a sinister and universal desire for world domination. In our view, perceived homogeneity and intergroup boundaries are established by social belief and social context, and it is these factors, not the activation of a “species” module, that contribute most strongly to essentialist beliefs. takeyuki tsuda Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, Calif. 92093-0521, U.S.A. (ttsuda@weber.ucsd.edu). 15 iii 01 Gil-White’s article defies many of the assumptions prevalent in current anthropological studies of ethnicity by adopting a cognitive, evolutionary, and utilitarian perspective. After hearing so much about the deessentialized, contested, situational, invented, deterritorialized, and culturally unbound nature of ethnicity, it is refreshing to see someone conducting serious research on ethnicity in such a “traditional” framework. As Gil-White notes, few scholars have in fact advocated an essentialist approach that naturalizes ethnicity as primordial, biologically inherited, and ontologically predetermined, suggesting that the constructivists are constructing a straw man to highlight what is new about their perspective. More important, however, as he points out, constructivists do not fully realize that most of our informants perceive ethnicity (emically) in a highly essentialist manner. They often seem to assume that the people they write about are just as theoretically sophisticated as they are and share the same theoretical insights (in this case, that ethnicity is socially constructed). Many anthropologists will take issue with Gil-White’s model for the evolution of such essentialist ethnic thinking. It is based on the assumption that humans began to engage in inductive overgeneralization about the cultural traits of ethnic outsiders because it was the most efficient way of perceiving and comprehending them. 546 F current anthropology Volume 42, Number 4, August–October 2001 One wonders whether the evolution of this type of ethnic cognition follows the law of natural selection, since human thought in general does not always aim to maximize cognitive and interactional efficiency. It is doubtful that cognitive patterns that are less instrumentally beneficial and adaptationally advantageous than others will always become extinct, especially where they do not threaten the social survival of a group. Ultimately, such social evolutionary theories tend to be based less on empirical, historical evidence than on purely logical reasoning. Thus Gil-White seems to present us with an essentialized (naturalistic/biological) explanation for why people essentialize ethnic groups. Therefore, he simply shifts the focus from previous anthropological explanations of essentialized ethnic groups on the etic level (as an externally observable social fact) to individuals’ essentialized ethnic consciousness and perceptions on an emic level. This is consistent with the increased recent attention to ethnic identity (emic) as contrasted with ethnic group formation and characteristics (etic). GilWhite claims that because ethnic groups are perceived to possess a relatively immutable “nature” and essence, most individuals around the world do not and cannot freely choose and switch their ethnicities in response to sociopolitical benefits (contrary to what the constructivists claim) until they reach the second generation and begin intermarrying. However, despite the current popularity of the concept of ethnogenesis, I doubt that even radical constructivists would argue that ethnicity can be completely manipulated and invented. Because GilWhite’s essentialist explanation for people’s essentialized emic consciousness and their resulting etic ethnic behavior can be easily problematized in these ways, I am afraid that he may be adding to the (virtually nonexistent) essentialist literature on ethnicity and thus providing ammunition for those he opposes. I also wonder about the cross-cultural applicability of the analysis. Despite the numerous brief citations of other research that Gil-White musters to support the generalizability of his ethnic model, he himself notes that his theory does not really apply to the United States, where ethnic affiliation is becoming less salient than a national American identity (many scholars argue that precisely the opposite is happening). It seems that the real reason many individuals in the United States (and, by extension, other multiethnic complex societies) no longer essentialize ethnic affiliation is that they have developed multiple and hybrid ethnic affiliations (only very briefly mentioned in the article) that defy easy classification, allowing them to present themselves somewhat differently in different situations. Gil-White’s evolutionary model of ethnic consciousness seems to presume that individuals belong primarily to one ethnic group and do not contend with multiple memberships and loyalties. If so, it would apply only to a limited number of simple societies in which ethnic groups are still relatively isolated, consider each other to be mutually exclusive, and remain endogamous. However, there are not many simple societies of this type today. This is the problem with an analysis that is built upon a dichotomy of ethnic constructivism versus essentialism, since most people’s ethnic behavior and consciousness fall somewhere in between. Although individuals do construct and manipulate their ethnic identity to a certain extent, they do so under the essentialist constraints of socialized and “inherited” cultural and racial characteristics which prevent the free crossing of ethnic group boundaries. Reply francisco j. gil-white Los Angeles, Calif., U.S.A. 26 v 01 My commentators in general consider that the empirical results are important, demand an explanation, and point out deficiencies in previous theorizing. With one exception, their criticisms engage the ideas seriously. Methodological issues and hypothesis testing. Laitin observes that my respondents easily granted “that many cultural characteristics were learned, and by implication the predictions you could make about a Mongol child raised by Kazakhs would not be nearly as good as those made about Mongols raised by Mongols.” So, he intimates, they are not as essentialist as all that. But if I make people explicitly agree with the premise that the adopted child will acquire all of the customs, habits, language, and traditions of the Kazakhs, I make it impossible for them to say that the child will be a lot like a Mongol (it’s in the nature of the exercise). However, despite granting this extreme enculturation premise, subjects resisted the idea that the child would be quite like the Kazakhs (even absent any contact with Mongols or knowledge of true ancestry). To assume that there is a Mongol “essence” is to think that the child has the potential and tendency naturally to behave like a Mongol, but people know that humans learn. The burden of demonstrating essentialism should not be that of showing people to be fools who deny learning. Astuti finds problematic (but does not say why) that in question 3 “participants were told that, rather than asked whether, the adopted baby would learn the customs and language of the adoptive group.” The point was to see whether enculturation or descent was more important for ethnic ascription. By telling participants that the adopted child was thoroughly socialized into the adopting ethnie’s culture, I set the contrast that would test that question. Astuti finds “interesting” that my respondents privilege birth over nurture, so the unstated problems are apparently not fatal. She finds the interest of the result mitigated, in any case, by the fact that it is no more than one ethnographic case of essentialism and characterizes my claim that the descent privilege for ethnic ascriptions is universal as “contentious” and disproved by my own data with the Kazakhs. But scattered exceptions—to say nothing of a single contradictory case such as the Kazakhs (if they gil-white Are Ethnic Groups Biological “Species” to the Human Brain? F 547 were indeed such)—will hardly disprove a prediction about an expected pattern. We do need to establish empirically the relative frequency of ethnic essentialism, and I am ready to accept that my theory may find its predictions unsupported by cross-cultural data. But we must be clear on what my main claim is: it is not quite that most ethnies will be essentialized. Any claim that ethnies will do x or y will become—given the plethora of contending definitions and extensions used by scholars—as many different claims in their minds. I have used the term “ethnie” merely to communicate a rough understanding that is in the overlap of all the definitions and extensions used, but my claims and predictions do not use or need the term, and they are quite specific. The prediction is that those social categories which show normative endogamy and descent-based membership will be the ones more likely to be essentialized and essentialized more strongly. The prediction is about such categories, not narrowly about what any particular scholar may insist is an “ethnie,” and is thus applicable to castes and any other category that has the stated properties. (Similarly, my evolutionary argument requires that we agree that norms will cluster and that clusters tend to become endogamous, not that we agree to call these clusters “ethnies.”) Rothbart and Taylor seem to think that I have argued just the opposite, and they complain that different kinds of categories, not just ethnies, can be essentialized. But we are in complete agreement on that point. Laitin, for his part, presents the variability in essentialist beliefs over space and time as weakening my hypothesis, but it is the nature of the variability that will undermine my claims. If essentialist beliefs weaken when the cues that make a social category resemble a species are attenuated, this variability, rather than disconfirming my hypothesis, will follow its predictions rather precisely. It is obvious that I failed to be clear on these points, given that Banton focuses exclusively on the fact that scholars don’t agree on the use of a particular lexeme—“ethnic”1 —and on the historical changes in technical, legal, and official definitions attached to it rather than on my arguments about what will cause socialcategory essentialism and why. Ma, similarly, interprets my argument as being about ethnies as in fact immutable entities rather than about the cognitive biases that certain perceptions will trigger. Rothbart and Taylor focus on a definition of “module” that they favor rather than on my claims, which do not need the word “module” (which, again, was used to communicate a rough idea 1. The semantic morass is not quite what it seems. Scholars disagree when they write down explicit definitions of “ethnic group” that they hope will advance a priori theoretical commitments. This naturally leads to a proliferation of definitions, for here ideology holds more sway than science and one makes a point not by showing something but by redefining the terms everybody else is using. Despite this, whatever scholars’ explicit definitions of “ethnic,” their extensions (i.e., the groups they label “ethnic”) overlap greatly, apparently because they follow their intuitions in extending as “ethnic” “agglomerations of people who, at a minimum, represent themselves as vertically reproducing historical units implying cultural ‘peoplehood’” (Gil-White 1999:813). rather than a fundamental theoretical point). And Tsuda thinks that my claims overreach because not all ethnic groups are as easily demarcable or impermeable as I supposedly make them all out to be. I hope I have now made clear why these objections miss the point, but I accept the blame if my presentation was suboptimal. Astuti defends Hirschfeld’s (1996) attention to child cognition because “no amount of cross-cultural evidence of adult reasoning would support his claim that humans are endowed with an innate predisposition to essentialize human kinds.” Evidence from adults, she claims, even if universally consistent across cultures with my predictions, would not constitute support for my theory (her converse claim that one counterexample disproves my theory appears to be a double standard). I cannot agree with her position. If we find that, all over the world, adults intuitively essentialize normatively endogamous categories with descent-based membership even when their explicit cultural models tell them not to, an innatist explanation for this pattern becomes more plausible than the alternative. This does not diminish the value of developmental data; any prediction worth investigating should be attacked by gathering independent lines of evidence to see if they converge on the same qualitative answer. What could falsify my hypothesis? Perhaps the fact that we essentialize gender, Gelman ventures. She observes that endogamy and descent-based membership cannot explain why gender is essentialized. I would make the list longer, for neither can they explain essentialism of individuals, kin groups, and objects. But how are these counterexamples to my hypothesis? I have claimed that endogamy and descent-based membership will increase the likelihood and the extent to which a social category will be essentialized, not that nothing else can cause essentialism or that living-kind essentialism is the only kind possible. Gender and kin essentialism are distinct phenomena orthogonal to my theory (cf. Atran’s [1998:596] response to Solomon). The Vezo, Astuti claims, constitute a counterexample. But to know this we must not merely show them to be nonessentialists; in addition, we must determine whether for the Vezo (1) membership is a matter of descent and (2) category endogamy is normative. If this is the case, we have a genuine counterexample, and showing my theory to be unsupported is a matter of demonstrating that genuine counterexamples are more common than the predicted pattern. Though Astuti would include the Kazakhs I study as one such counterexample, I would disagree, as stated in the paper. Failure to find caste essentialism would be a real counterexample, for castes are normatively endogamous and descent-based. The Mahalingam (1998) results that Gelman refers me to are equivocal, however. First, although lower-caste adults were not essentialists, upper-caste adults were. The historical context is relevant here. Meritocracy is taking hold in India, and the political implications of this have not been lost on the lower castes. Since the traditional caste system promotes the antithesis of upward mobility, denying its assumptions serves 548 F current anthropology Volume 42, Number 4, August–October 2001 the legitimizing of lower-caste upward mobility and future enlarged opportunities. If correct, this predicts that lower-caste members most exposed to the recent political changes (i.e., those in urban centers) will show the strongest reluctance to essentialize caste membership, whereas those in rural areas will be more essentialist. In any case, the proper analysis must try to see whether essentialism, normative endogamy, and descent-based membership travel together. The strongest refutation of my hypothesis will come if those explicitly committed to the descent-based acquisition of caste status and to the undesirability of intercaste unions show explicit and intuitive nonessentialist reasoning about attributes. Gelman sees important confounds in my data because the Mongol/Kazakh contrast has, in addition to (1) endogamy and (2) descent-based membership, the features of (3) sharp boundaries, (4) immutability of membership, (5) inductive potential, (6) possession of obvious similarities, and (7) the belief in nonobvious similarities, and any of these could be responsible for essentialism. But the Beelinkhen/Bangyakhan contrast has nothing going for it except descent-based membership. Although a laboratory study (in progress) will address what primes essentialism better than my current data, I think this objection is weaker than it may at first appear, for the items in Gelman’s list are highly redundant. Items (3) and (4) are not features in addition to (1) and (2) but result directly from them. Item (6) causes (5). Finally, item (7) is itself a product of essentialist thinking, not its cause. So the only thing in the Mongol/Kazakh contrast in addition to endogamy and descent that might cause essentialism is “cultural differences.” What, then, differentiates the ethnic contrast from the clan contrast? Endogamy practices? Only in a minor quantitative sense; the overwhelming majority of clan members marry other clan members (to the point that the government has worried publicly about inbreeding depression). Cultural differences? Again, only in a quantitative sense, although here the difference between the two contrasts is admittedly not minor. But there are nevertheless dialectic differences between the clans that even I can easily notice, and Torguuds perceive other cultural differences though they have trouble listing them. The only dramatic and qualitative difference between the two contrasts is the rule of endogamy. Parents raise no principled objection (they may have preferences) to interclan or indeed intertribal marriages, but they consider it a matter of principle that their children not marry across the ethnic boundary. Theoretical issues. In the summary of history that Atran favors, mutual predation by human groups is what drives psychology, and essentialism reinforces both ingroup similarity, cooperation, and cohesion and intergroup demarcations. I am skeptical that this process can really be the engine of ethnic essentialism given that for most of history the antagonistic political units have typically been either smaller (e.g., bands, clans, tribes) or larger (e.g., some chiefdoms, empires) than ethnies. Political units are not strongly essentialized unless they coincide with ethnic boundaries. My argument is not about cooperative coalitions locked in combat but about the emergence of clustered variation in interactional norms, which results if people are unevenly distributed in the physical landscape and adapted to conform to locally common interactional norms. My account treats the imperative of navigating adaptively a world composed of norm clusters as causing ethnic-category essentialism. Atran does not comment on this argument, however, except to observe that he doubts (without saying why) that there is a domain of “norms” that could have selected for elements of human psychology. Atran believes that social-category essentialism results not from specialized derived psychology but purely from the “big mistake” misfiring of an ancestral cognitive trait—the living-kind module—which occurs because putatively “racial” phenotypic attributes are sufficient to trick this module into perceiving a species boundary. This process results in a “looping effect” that creates “human kinds together with inferential means for making reliable predictions about them (if only as a self-fulfilling prophecy).” I see two problems with this argument. First, phenotypic differences hardly appear necessary for essentialism. Torguuds and Kazakhs overlap considerably in their diagnostic traits (Gil-White 2001b), which is not true for the stimuli in Hirschfeld’s (1996) studies, where subjects reasoned about the largest phenotypic contrast possible among humans. Closer to home, it was not long ago that the English considered the Irish a nonwhite “race.” Is it really that easy to visually distinguish Irish from English? And is the phenotypic contrast between them so dramatic that—by itself—it should promote the intuition of two separate species? (It seems more likely that the Irish were essentialized as a separate “race” because English and Irish practiced normative endogamy.) We will not know for sure until developmental data are collected—a` la Hirschfeld (1996)—for such meager phenotypic contrasts, but at first blush it does not seem likely that children will essentialize them. Nevertheless, Hirschfeld (1996:102–7) already has a result supporting the argument I defend—that culture drives evolved psychology in this domain. He found—to his surprise—that three-year-olds essentialize people of the same phenotype but dressed in different uniforms (e.g., police officer) virtually as much as they essentialize people with dramatically different phenotypes. Why this result? Because differences in clothing should prime the living-kind module? A more plausible alternative is that children are specifically looking out for uniforms as a shortcut for guessing which categories ought to be essentialized. Clustering of norms in the ancestral environment, after all, would have made it sensible to signal which normgroup one came from, leading to the evolution of ethnic markers (McElreath, Boyd, and Richerson 2001). Since young children presumably have yet to learn that policemen do not typically marry policewomen or necessarily—or even typically—beget police-children (or, indeed, that this is how one definitively picks out living kinds), we get Hirschfeld’s interesting result. When children become adults they no longer essentialize police gil-white Are Ethnic Groups Biological “Species” to the Human Brain? F 549 officers as a natural kind because by then they have learned about the importance of descent and marriage for “living kind-ness” and about the practices of police officers in these domains. From this perspective, phenotype contrasts are essentialized by children because the brain is tricked into seeing sharp phenotypic differences as ethnic “uniforms.” Hirschfeld finds that by age seven dramatic phenotype contrasts are almost unanimously essentialized, which may follow from increasing awareness of normative prescriptions against interracial marriage.2 The second problem is that essentialized phenotypic categories (i.e., so-called races) have not coalesced through a self-fulfilling prophecy into groups with any kind of inferential potential. There is simply nothing to infer from membership in a putative race qua “race,” for so-called races are vast collections of subgroups with a dizzying array of behavioral standards and practices. It is in the subgroups—neighboring ethnies with strongly overlapping phenotypic distributions—that normative differences cluster, rather than at the boundaries of “races.”3 Rothbart and Taylor note that interaction with ethnic out-group members could be adaptive rather than maladaptive because it brings technological innovation. I agree that acquiring superior technology from others is sensible, but I disagree that interaction across the ethnic boundary is thereby rendered generally adaptive. My argument is about interactional norms, that is, those rules that have to do with making promises and contracts, hosting a guest, consummating a marriage, raising a child, effecting a divorce, paying a debt, shaming and being shamed, etc. It is certainly adaptive for me to obtain superior knowledge in technological and empirical domains wherever it may come from, but it will be maladaptive to adopt a set of interactional norms that the people in my own community neither expect nor endorse, and it will be costly to attempt many interactions with people in other communities who play the games of life in different ways. A current study of knowledge transfer between two different ethnic communities in Guatemala (Atran et al. 1999) shows that very little and very superficial contact between members of the two local communities is sufficient for the transmission of adaptive knowledge about ecological relationships and agro-forestry practices. Knowledge flows from the biologically expert Itza’ Maya to the recently arrived Ladino through only one or two human vectors, prestigious Ladino individuals who learn from prestigious Itza’ individuals. Other Ladinos then acquire this knowledge from the prestigious Ladinos. This process is perfectly con2. Perhaps Rothbart and Taylor will find this logic tortured, but I find no value to parsimonious explanations that fail to account for the facts. In evolution, where selection pressures are always changing direction and magnitude and adaptive lags are common, the facts often call for explanations that fall short of optimal parsimony. 3. Marked phenotypic discontinuities occur in given localities only because of modern migrations anyway. The supposedly “racial” categories themselves all blend insensibly into each other [Boyd and Silk 2000, Brown and Armelagos 2001]. sistent with the structure of social learning through prestige processes as defended in Henrich and Gil-White (2001). The point is that very little actual interaction—and certainly not very intimate interaction—is sufficient for transfers of empirical and technological knowledge between ethnic communities; one interethnic interactant will suffice. All others will be faced with either cheaply obtaining the information from this coethnic or doing so by means of costly interactions with out-group ethnics. The adaptive path is clear. Rothbart and Taylor assert that the Nazis ideologically imposed homogeneity on the diverse Weimar Jews, who were in fact a collection of very diverse communities with different origins. Even if correct, this observation does not undermine my argument that actual inductive potential is not the proximate priming input that causes essentialism. If the Weimar Jews were such a motley collection of peoples, then the cleavages of inductive potential would occur at the boundaries of the different communities Rothbart and Taylor list. It is apparent, then, that it cannot have been the actual “inductive potential” inherent in Weimar Jews qua Jews that caused Nazis to essentialize them as one homogeneous whole, especially given that ultra-Germanized Jews were grouped with quite different communities. Thus, by correcting my characterization of the Weimar Jews, Rothbart and Taylor make my point for me in a different way: Weimar Jews were probably essentialized as “Jews” not because this resulted in greater inductive potential than alternatives but because descent-based membership and category-based endogamy were perceived as coextensive with the label “Jew.” Hamilton, Sherman, and Sack take on the issue of the domain which my theory is supposed to explain and construe my effort as that of finding out what a “group” is from the point of view of observers. But, in fact, I am skeptical that the question “What is a group?” is a useful one. The extension of “group,” as used by social psychologists and other social scientists, includes a staggering diversity of things (e.g., minimal groups, face-toface groups, ethnies, political parties, etc.) that our cognition cuts into several different joints. “Group” is a rather strange yet mainstream abstraction among scholars the use of which gives them license to argue from exotic results obtained with completely artificial “groups” (e.g., minimal groups) to the processes at work in, say, ethnic conflict (e.g., Tajfel and Turner 1979). The term “group” usually tempts social analysts to project the properties that are most strongly associated with the term and that emerged from “small-group research” (Homans 1968:259) onto massive categories that don’t have those properties. As Deutsch (1968:265) notes, the usage of “group” “is consonant with the intuitive notion that a group is an entity that consists of interacting people who are aware of being psychologically bound together in terms of mutually linked interests. A group is thus to be distinguished from [a]... category . . . which consists of people who are classified together because of some common characteristic.” My question is: How do observers decide that they are 550 F current anthropology Volume 42, Number 4, August–October 2001 looking at one kind of social category and not another? A social category need not have the properties most strongly associated with “groups,” and it is only recently, with the advent of ethnonationalism, that some ethnies have converged somewhat on those properties. The term “ethnic group” is therefore mostly a misnomer, promoting intuitions not about what is fundamental to ethnies but about the historically recent intersections between some political and ethnic boundaries. Such intersections are what occupy political scientists who study ethnicity. When Laitin, in the spirit of Fearon and Laitin (1996), observes that the boundaries of the ethnic group need to be policed by ethnic entrepreneurs, he is thinking more about ethnic-wide cooperation—a prisoner’s dilemma payoff matrix with incentives for cheaters—than about coordination—a payoff matrix without incentives to cheat but rather costs to those who fail to match their standards of behavior and signaling systems (the latter, not the former, is the substance of my evolutionary argument for our adaptations for processing ethnies). This focus on ethnic cooperation pretends that ethnies behave qua ethnies and treats entire ethnic categories with the intuitions that go best with small face-to-face groups, conferring on them a degree of “groupness” that they do not have. Ethnies are usually vast by comparison with the scope of informal political organization, social control, reputation network, etc., which typically extends only as far as the local residential community (clan, village, etc.). And the fact that some modern states are ethnonational hardly makes this situation the quintessence of ethnic organization. Coming back to the question of perception, Hamilton and colleagues say that “entitativity is the unity, coherence, bondedness among individuals that causes them to be perceived as a group.” But this communicates little unless it is self-evident that “group” is supposed to tell us something about cognitive processing. These commentators make clear that their project is finding out which antecedent inputs lead to what consequent processing biases, and this is my project too. The term “group” is at best superfluous and at worst misleading to this endeavor. Let us find out what certain inputs do or do not prime in social reasoning, without the awkward term “group” and its baggage to muddy our understanding. Instead of justifying a priori semantic commitments, let us choose our scientific terminology to fit the phenomena we discover. If we do, it is probably best to drop “entitativity” as it is currently employed. Hamilton and colleagues’ claim that ethnies are low in perceived entitativity appears to confuse the degree of (objective) entitativity that a scientist can measure with a person’s (subjective) intuition that a given category is like an entity. Are ethnies low in the latter? I doubt it. It seems more likely that laypeople (and scholars of ethnicity!) process ethnies as coherent entities because they are essentialized and despite the fact that their objective entitativity is low. Hamilton and colleagues are right that essentialism and entitativity are distinct concepts, but so are objective and subjective entitativity, and the causal relationships between the phenomena denoted by any of these concepts should not be assumed a priori. My points concerning endogamy have met with considerable resistance. Astuti says, “If endogamy is what primes actors to perceive ethnic groups as animal species, intermarriage should be inconceivable,” and Boyer, Laitin, and Ma raise the same objection. The point seems to depend on the example chosen. Laitin chooses to mate a giraffe with an elephant. That is indeed a strange mating. The point would be made more forcefully with the example of a bear that mates with a fly or a whale that mates with a protozoan. But if we consider interethnic marriage like mating a dog with a wolf or a donkey with a horse the force of this objection seems to evaporate. Such matings are not only behaviorally and anatomically plausible but occur and produce viable offspring. Importantly, these examples concern matings between species the close relation of which is apparent in the similarities they show in morphology and behavior. Any two humans in an interethnic marriage are obviously very similar, so my just-offered interspecies examples are a much better parallel—in terms of how our cognition perceives things—than the mating between a giraffe and an elephant. The intuitions which make us think that the mating between a wolf and a dog is possible but unnatural could easily be responsible for similar reasoning about interethnic marriages. The claim I have made is that normative endogamy helps trigger the intuition that one sees a “species”—that is, the trigger is not the perception of the impossibility of an interethnic mating but the perception that such things are immoral and therefore also unnatural (or vice versa), which may be underlain to a greater or lesser degree by the actual rate of intermarriage. The objection just addressed seems to flow from the perception that priming inputs have to be either “on” or “off.” But in this as in so many other domains, the brain is probably primed on a continuum: the stronger the public normative prohibition against intermarriage in a time and place, the more closely such a prohibition is observed, and the more rigid the requirement of membership by descent, the closer the input match will be to that of a species-like category and therefore the more likely humans will be to activate the essentialism exapted from the living-kind module. That is my claim. Gelman points out that endogamy cannot work as a priming input unless it is perceived and understood and suspects that children may essentialize social categories even before they acquire knowledge of endogamy. However, this does not undermine my claims unless the point at which humans make the link between “living kindness” and endogamy is material to the substance of my argument. Suppose that at first children assume merely that the unseen and hidden essence exists and is somehow causally responsible for typical surface features and yet-to-be-discovered “hidden” properties (i.e., all they initially have is an “essence placeholder” [Medin and Ortony 1989:184–85]). The thing which initially primes a child to essentialize may be nothing more than certain key surface appearances. For example, the assumptions gil-white Are Ethnic Groups Biological “Species” to the Human Brain? F 551 that Markman (1991) describes as responsible for objectword acquisition may automatically include, for objects that appear to be animate, the additional assumption that there is a causal essence common to all members of the class. But any specific content about what the essence is, how it works, the “hidden” properties it implies, and how it is acquired remains mostly to be filled in, for children start with little beyond the “essence placeholder” itself. If this picture is reasonable, then Gelman’s suspicion that children will essentialize social categories before they learn about endogamy is likely to be correct, for endogamy is merely something that shared livingkind essence is supposed to imply, and this supposition is part of what is waiting to be filled in. When children learn that members of species categories mate only with each other and that by so doing they reproduce the kind, they learn an explicitly causal story for the production of tokens of the class that is then naturally tied to the causal essence that they have assumed from the start is there. To think of members of a living kind mating and reproducing is practically to see the essence in the process of being transmitted; children’s brains are waiting for just this kind of information, and the “essence placeholder” is what makes them wait in the right way. If we find that young children deploy essentialism when presented with cues that are usually good markers for social categories that ought to be essentialized, but later—once endogamy and descent-based membership have been linked to “living kind-ness”—categories lacking these two key properties cease to be essentialized, this will be consistent with the present argument. The aforementioned result of Hirschfeld (1996:102–7) that three-yearolds but not seven-year-olds essentialize police uniforms almost as much as phenotypic contrasts is in perfect harmony with this argument. References Cited alba, r. d. 1990. Ethnic identity: The transformation of white America. New Haven: Yale University Press. alexander, r. 1989. “Evolution of the human psyche,” in The human revolution. Edited by C. Stringer. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. [sa] allport, g. 1954. The nature of prejudice. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley. armstrong, s., l. gleitman, and h. gleitman. 1983. What some concepts might not be. Cognition 13: 263–308. asch, s. e. 1956. Studies of independence and conformity: 1. Minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychological Monographs 70 (416). ———. 1963 (1951). “Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgments,” in Groups, leadership, and men. Edited by H. Guetzkow. New York: Russell and Russell. astuti, rita. 1995a. People of the sea: Identity and descent among the Vezo of Madagascar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [ra] ———. 1995b. “The Vezo are not a kind of people”: Identity, difference, and “ethnicity” among a fishing people of western Madagascar. American Ethnologist 22:464–82. [ra] ———. 2001a. Are we all “natural dualists”? A cognitive developmental approach. (The Malinowski Memorial Lecture.) Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 7:429–47. [ra, pb] ———. 2001b. Reasoning about human and animal kinds in Madagascar. MS. [ra] atran, s. 1990. Cognitive foundations of natural history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1994. “Core domains versus scientific theories: Evidence from systematics and Itza-Maya folkbiology,” in Mapping the mind: Domain-specificity in cognition and culture. Edited by L. A. Hirschfeld and S. Gelman, pp. 316–40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [ra] ———. 1995. “Causal constraints on categories and categorical constraints on biological reasoning across cultures,” in Causal cognition: A multidisciplinary debate. Edited by D. Sperber, D. Premack, and A. J. Premack. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1998. Folk-biology and the anthropology of science: Cognitive universals and cultural particulars. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21:547–609. ———. n.d. In gods we trust: The evolutionary landscape of religion. New York: Oxford University Press. [sa] atran, s., p. estin, j. coley, and d. medin. 1997. Generic species and basic levels: Essence and appearance in folk biology. Journal of Ethnobiology 17:17–43. atran, s., d. medin, e. lynch, v. vapnarsky, e. ucan ek’, and p. sousa. 2001. Folkbiology doesn’t come from folkpsychology: Evidence from Yukatek Maya in crosscultural perspective. Journal of Cognition and Culture 1:3–43. [sa] atran, s., d. medin, n. ross, e. lynch, j. coley, and e. v. ucan ek’. 1999. Folkecology and commons management in the Maya lowlands. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A. 96:7598–7603. au, t. k., and l. f. romo. 1999. “Mechanical causality in children’s folkbiology,” in Folkbiology. Edited by D. L. Medin and S. Atran. Cambridge: MIT Press. banks, marcus. 1996. Ethnicity: Anthropological constructions. London: Routledge. [mb] banton, michael. 1977. The idea of race. London: Tavistock/Boulder: Westview Press. [nb] ———. 2000. Ethnic conflict. Sociology 34:481–98. [mb] baron-cohen, s. 1995. Mindblindness: An essay on autism and theory of mind. Cambridge: MIT Press. [mr, mt] barth, f. Editor. 1969. Ethnic groups and boundaries: The social organization of cultural differences. Boston: Little, Brown. ———. 1994. “Enduring and emerging issues in the analysis of ethnicity,” in The anthropology of ethnicity: Beyond “Ethnic groups and boundaries”. Edited by H. Vermeulen and C. Govers. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis. berlin, b. 1992. Ethnobiological classification. Princeton: Princeton University Press. berlin, b., d. breedlove, and p. raven. 1974. Principles of Tzeltal plant classification. New York: Academic Press. bessac, f. b 1965. Co-variation between interethnic relations and social organization in Inner Asia. Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters 50:373–92. bhabha, h. k. Editor. 1990. Nation and narration. London: Routledge. ———. Editor. 1994. The location of culture. London: Routledge. bloch, maurice. 1993. Zafimaniry birth and kinship theory. Social Anthropology 1:119–32. [ra] bloch, maurice, gregg e. a. solomon, and susan carey. 2001. An understanding of what is passed on from parents to children: A cross-cultural investigation. Culture and Cognition 1:43–68. [ra, pb] boyd, r., and p. j. richerson. 1985. Culture and the evolutionary process. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. boyd, r., and j. silk. 2000. 2d edition. How humans evolved. New York: W. W. Norton. boyer, p. 1990. Tradition as truth and communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1994. The naturalness of religious ideas. Berkeley: University of California Press. 552 F current anthropology Volume 42, Number 4, August–October 2001 brown, c. 1984. Language and living things: Uniformities in folk classification and naming. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. brown, r. a., and g. j. armelagos. 2001. Apportionment of racial diversity: A review. Evolutionary Anthropology 10:34–40. campbell, d. t. 1958. Common fate, similarity, and other indices of the status of aggregates of persons as social entities. Behavioral Science 3:14–25. carey, s. 1985. Conceptual change in childhood. Cambridge: Bradford Books. ———. 1995. “On the origin of causal understanding,” in Causal cognition: A multidisciplinary debate. Edited by D. Sperber and A. J. Premack, pp. 268–302. Oxford: Clarendon Press. [ra] ———. 1996. “Cognitive domains as modes of thought,” in Modes of thought. Edited by D. Olson and N. Torrance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. carsten, janet. 1995. The politics of forgetting: Migration, kinship, and memory on the periphery of the Southeast Asian state. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 1:317–35. [ra] coley, j. d., d. l. medin, j. b. proffitt, e. lynch, and s. atran. 1999. “Inductive reasoning in folkbiological thought,” in Folkbiology. Edited by D. Medin and S. Atran. Cambridge: MIT Press. [sag] collins, a., and e. f. loftus. 1975. A spreading activation theory of semantic processing. Psychological Review 82: 407–28. cosmides, l., and j. tooby. 1994. “Origins of domainspecificity: The evolution of functional organization,” in Mapping the mind: Domain-specificity in cognition and culture. Edited by L. A. Hirschfeld and S. Gelman, pp. 85–116. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [pb] deutsch, k. w. 1953. Nationalism and social communication: An inquiry into the foundations of nationality. New York: John Wiley. deutsch, m. 1968. “Group behavior,” in International encyclopedia of the social sciences, vol. 6. Edited by D. L. Sills, pp. 265–75. New York: Macmillan and Free Press. diehl, m. 1990. The minimal group paradigm: Theoretical explanations and empirical findings. European Review of Social Psychology 1:263–92. diesendruck, g., and s. a. gelman. 1999. Domain differences in absolute judgments of category membership: Evidence for an essentialist account of categorization. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 6:338–46. [sag] diesendruck, g., s. a. gelman, and k. lebowitz. 1998. Conceptual and linguistic biases in children’s word learning. Developmental Psychology 34:823–39. [sag] fabian, j. 1999. Comment on: Cultural logic and Maya identity, by Edward F. Fischer. current anthropology 40:489–90. fearon, james d. 2000. What is identity (as we now use the word)? MS, Department of Political Science, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif. fearon, james d., and david d. laitin. 1996. Explaining ethnic cooperation. American Political Science Review 90: 715–35. [ddl] ———. 2000. Violence and the social construction of ethnic identities. International Organization 54:845–77. [ddl] fei xiaotong. 1988. Collection of Fei Xiaotong on ethnicity (in Chinese). Beijing: Ethnicity Press. [mr] fischer, edward f. 1999. Cultural logic and Maya identity: Rethinking constructivism and essentialism. current anthropology 40:473–99. fodor, j. 1983. The modularity of mind: An essay on faculty psychology. Cambridge: MIT Press. [mr, mt] ———. 1998. Concepts: Where cognitive science went wrong. Oxford: Clarendon Press. [sag] fox, james. 1987. “The house as a type of social organization on the island of Roti,” in De la hutte au palais: Socie´te´s ‘a` maison’ en Asie du Sud-Est insulaire. Edited by C. Macdonald. Paris: CNRS. [ra] f r i e d , m . 1975. The notion of tribe. Menlo Park, Calif.: Cummings. garcı´a canclini, n. 1995. Hybrid cultures: Strategies for entering and leaving modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. gellner, ernest. 1998. Nationalism. New York: New York University Press. [ddl] gelman, s. a. 1988. The development of induction within natural kin and artifact categories. Cognitive Psychology 20: 65–95. ———. 1996. “Concepts and theories,” in Perceptual and cognitive development. (2d edition, Handbook of perception and cognition.) Edited by R. Gelman and T. Kit-Fong, pp. 117–50. San Diego: Academic Press. gelman, s. a., p. collman, and e. e. maccoby. 1986. Inferring properties from categories versus inferring categories from properties: The case of gender. Child Development 57: 396–404. [sag] gelman, s. a., and l. a. hirschfeld. 1999. “How biological is essentialism?” in Folkbiology. Edited by D. Medin and S. Atran. Cambridge: MIT Press. gelman, s. a., m. hollander, j. star, and g. d. heyman. 2000. The role of language in the construction of kinds. Psychology of Learning and Motivation 39:201–63. [sag] gelman, s. a., and e. m. markman. 1986. Categories and induction in young children. Cognition 23:183–209. ———. 1987. Young children’s inductions from natural kinds: The role of categories and appearances. Child Development 58: 1532–41. gelman, s. a., and d. l. medin. 1993. What’s so essential about essentialism? A different perspective on the interaction of perception, language, and conceptual knowledge. Cognitive Development 8:157–67. gelman, s. a., and a. w. o’reilly. 1988. Children’s inductive inferences within superordinate categories: The role of language and category structure. Child Development 59: 876–87. gelman, s. a., and h. wellman. 1991. Insides and essences: Early understandings of the non-obvious. Cognition 28: 213–44. g i l - w h i t e , f . j . 1999. How thick is blood? The plot thickens: If ethnic actors are primordialists, what remains of the circumstantialist/primordialist controversy? Ethnic and Racial Studies 22:789–820. ———. 2001a. The cognition of ethnicity: Native category systems under the field-experimental microscope. Field Methods. In press. ———. 2001b. “Ultimatum game with an ethnicity manipulation: Results from Bulgan Cum, Mongolia,” in Cooperation, punishment, and reciprocity: Experiments in 16 small-scale societies. Edited by J. Henrich, R. Boyd, and H. Gintis. MS. ———. 2001c. Sorting is not categorization: A critique of the claim that Brazilians have fuzzy racial categories. Cognition and Culture 1(3). In press. golden, p. b. 1992. An introduction to the history of the Turkic peoples: Ethnogenesis and state-formation in medieval and early modern Eurasia and the Middle East. Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz. goodman, n. 1972. “Seven strictures on similarity,” in Problems and projects. Edited by N. Goodman. New York: BobbsMerrill. gow, peter. 1991. Of mixed blood: Kinship and history in Peruvian Amazonia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [ra] gupta, a., and j. ferguson. 1992. Beyond culture: Space, identity, and the politics of difference. Cultural Anthropology 7:6–23. haaland, g. 1969. “Economic determinants in ethnic processes,” in Ethnic groups and boundaries. Edited by F. Barth. Boston: Little, Brown. ———. 1991. “Cultural content and ethnic boundaries,” in The ecology of choice and symbol: Essays in honour of Frederik Barth. Edited by R. Grønhaug, G. Haaland, and G. Henriksen. Bergen: Alma Mater. gil-white Are Ethnic Groups Biological “Species” to the Human Brain? F 553 hacking, i. 1995. “The looping effect of human kinds,” in Causal cognition. Edited by D. Sperber, D. Premack, and A. Premack. Oxford: Clarendon Press. [sa] hamilton, d. l., and s. j. sherman. 1996. Perceiving persons and groups. Psychological Review 103:336–55. hamilton, d. l., s. j. sherman, and l. castelli. 2001. A group by any other name . . .: The role of entitativity in group perception. European Review of Social Psychology 12. In press. [dlh, sjs, jds] hamilton, d. l., s. j. sherman, and b. lickel. 1998. “Perceiving social groups: The importance of the entitativity continuum,” in Intergroup cognition and intergroup behavior. Edited by C. Sedikides, J. Schopler, and C. A. Insko. Mahwah, N.J., and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. hamilton, d. l., s. j. sherman, and j. s. rodgers. n.d. “Perceiving the groupness of groups: Entitativity, homogeneity, essentialism, and stereotypes,” in The psychology of group perception: Contributions to the study of homogeneity, entitativity, and essentialism. Edited by V. Yzerbyt, C. M. Judd, and O. Corneille. Philadelphia: Psychology Press. [dlh, sjs, jds] haslam, n. o. 1998. Natural kinds, human kinds, and essentialism. Social Research 65:291–314. hatano, g., and k. inagaki. 1999. “A developmental perspective on informal biology,” in Folkbiology. Edited by D. L. Medin and S. Atran. Cambridge: MIT Press. hays, t. 1983. Ndumba folk biology and general principles of ethnobotanical classification and nomenclature. American Anthropologist 85:592–611. henrich, j., and r. boyd. 1998. The evolution of conformist transmission and the emergence of between-group differences. Evolution and Human Behavior 19:215–41. henrich, j., and f. j. gil-white. 2001. The evolution of prestige: Freely conferred status as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission. Evolution and Human Behavior 22. heyman, g. d., and s. a. gelman. 2000. Beliefs about the origins of human psychological traits. Developmental Psychology 36:665–78. [sag] hirschfeld, l. 1996. Race in the making: Cognition, culture, and the child’s construction of human kinds. Cambridge: MIT Press. ———. 1997. The conceptual politics of race: Lessons from our children. Ethos 25:63–92. [ra] h j o r t , a . 1979. Savanna town: Rural ties and urban opportunities in northern Kenya. Stockholm: University of Stockholm. homans, g. c. 1968. “The study of groups,” in International encyclopedia of the social sciences, vol. 6. Edited by D. L. Sills, pp. 259–64. New York: Macmillan and Free Press. humphrey, c. 1996. Shamans and elders. Oxford: Clarendon Press. hunn, e. 1977. Tzeltal folk zoology. New York: Academic Press. jeyifous, s. 1986. Antimodemo: Semantic conceptual development among the Yoruba. Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. just, roger. 1989. “Triumph of the ethnos,” in History and ethnicity. Edited by Elizabeth Tonkin, Maryon McDonald, and Malcolm Chapman. ASA Monographs 27. [mb] kahneman, d., p. slovic, and a. tversky. Editors. 1982. Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. kamp, h., and b. partee. 1995. Prototype theory and compositionality. Cognition 57:129–91. [sag] k e i l , f . 1989. Concepts, kinds, and cognitive development. Cambridge: MIT Press. kelly, r. 1985. The Nuer conquest: Structure and development of an expansionist system. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. kelman, h. c. 1958. Compliance, identification, and internalization: Three processes of attitude change. Journal of Conflict Resolution 2:51–60. khazanov, a. 1994. 2d edition. Nomads and the outside world. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. khodarkovsky, m. 1992. Where two worlds met: The Russian state and the Kalmyk nomads, 1600–1771. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. kobrin, f. e., and c. goldscheider. 1978. The ethnic factors in family structure and mobility. Cambridge: Ballinger. [mr] krader, l. 1955. Principles and structures in the organization of the Asiatic steppe-pastoralists. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 11:67–93. kuran, t. 1995. Private truths, public lies: The second consequences of preference falsification. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. kurzban, r. o. 1999. The social psychophysics of cooperation in groups. Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, Calif. [pb] laitin, david d. 1995. Marginality: A micro perspective. Rationality and Society 7:31–57. [ddl] lakoff, g. 1987. Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. leach, e. r. 1977 (1954). Political systems of highland Burma. London: London School of Economics and Political Science. levine, h. b. 1999. Reconstructing ethnicity. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5:165–80. levine, n. e. 1987. Caste, state, and ethnic boundaries in Nepal. Journal of Asian Studies 46:71–88. lickel, b., d. l. hamilton, g. wieczorkowska, a. lewis, s. j. sherman, and a. n. uhles. 2000. Varieties of groups and the perception of group entitativity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 78:223–46. [dlh, sjs, jds] linnekin, jocelyn, and lin power. Editors. 1990. Cultural identity and ethnicity in the Pacific. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. [ra] locke, j. 1964(1690). An essay concerning human understanding. New York: Meridian. mc elreath, r., r. boyd, and p. richerson. 2001. Shared norms can lead to the evolution of ethnic markers. MS. maffie, j. 1998. Atran’s evolutionary psychology: “Say it ain’t just so, Joe.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21:583. mahalingam, r. 1998. Essentialism, power, and representation of caste: A developmental study. Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pa. [sag] malt, b. c. 1989. An on-line investigation of prototype and exemplar strategies in classification. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 15:539–55. markman, e. m. 1991. “The whole-object, taxonomic, and mutual exclusivity assumptions as initial constraints on word meanings,” in Perspectives on language and thought: Interrelations in development. Edited by S. A. Gelman and J. P. Byrnes. New York: Cambridge University Press. matan, a., and s. strauss. 1998. Relations between innate endowments, cognitive development, domain specificity, and a taxonomy-creator. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21:584. mayr, e. 1964. “Introduction to a facsimile reprinnt of the 1st edition of ‘On the origin of species,”’ in On the origin of species. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press. medin, d., and s. atran. 1999. Folkbiology. Cambridge: MIT Press. medin, d. l., and a. ortony. 1989. “Psychological essentialism,” in Similarity and analogical reasoning. Edited by S. Vosniadou and A. Ortony, pp. 179–95. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. miller, d. t., and c. mc farland. 1991. “Why social comparison goes awry: The case of pluralistic ignorance,” in Social comparison: Contemporary theory and research. Edited by J. Suls and T. Ashby. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. miller, d. t., and d. a. prentice. 1999. “Some consequences of a belief in group essence: The category divide hypothesis,” in Cultural divides. Edited by D. A. Prentice and D. T. Miller. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. 554 F current anthropology Volume 42, Number 4, August–October 2001 mummendey, a., b. simon, c. dietze, m. gru¨ nert, g. haeger, s. kessler, s. lettgen, and s. sha¨ ferhoff. 1992. Categorization is not enough: Intergroup discrimination in negative outcome allocation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 28:155–44. nagata, j. 1981. “In defense of ethnic boundaries: The changing myths and charters of Malay identity,” in Ethnic change. Edited by C. F. Keyes. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press. nave, a. 2000. Marriage and the maintenance of ethnic group boundaries: The case of Mauritius. Ethnic and Racial Studies 23:329–52. pinker, s. 1997. How the mind works. New York and London: W. W. Norton. q u i n e , w. v. o . 1977. “Natural kinds,” in Naming, necessity, and natural kinds. Edited by S. P. Schwartz. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. r i p s , l . j . 1989. “Similarity, typicality, and categorization,” in Similarity and analogical reasoning. Edited by S. Vosniadou and A. Ortony. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. rosch, e. 1978. “Principles of categorization,” in Cognition and categorization. Edited by E. Rosch and B. B. Lloyd. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. rosch, e., and c. b. mervis. 1975. Family resemblance studies in the internal structure of categories. Cognitive Psychology 7:573–604. rosch, e., c. mervis, w. grey, d. johnson, and p. boyes-braem. 1976. Basic objects in natural categories. Cognitive Psychology 8:382–439. rosengren, k. s., c. n. johnson, and p. l. harris. 2000. Imagining the impossible: Magical, scientific, and religious thinking in children. New York: Cambridge University Press. [sag] rothbart, m., and m. taylor. 1992. “Category labels and social reality: Do we view social categories as natural kinds?” in Language, interaction, and social cognition. Edited by G. Semin and K. Fiedler. London: Sage. rozin, p., h. haidt, and c. r. mc cauley. 1993. “Disgust,” in Handbook of emotions. Edited by M. Lewis and J. M. Haviland. New York: Guilford Press. [pb] rozin, p., and c. j. nemeroff. 1990. “The laws of sympathetic magic: A psychological analysis of similarity and contagion,” in Cultural psychology: Essays on comparative human development. Edited by J. Stigler, G. Herdt, and R. A. Schweder, pp. 205–32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. salamone, f. a. 1974. Persistence and change in ethnic and religious identity in Yauri Emirate, North-Western State, Nigeria. New Haven: HRAFlex Books. sedikides, c., j. schopler, and c. a. insko. 1998. Intergroup cognition and intergroup behavior. Mahwah, N.J., and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. sherman, s. j., d. l. hamilton, and a. c. lewis. 1999. “Perceived entitativity and the social identity value of group memberships,” in Social identity and social cognition. Edited by D. Abrams and M. Hogg, pp. 80–110. Oxford: Blackwell. [dlh, sjs, jds] simons, d. j., and f. c. keil. 1995. An abstract to concrete shift in the development of biological thought: The insides story. Cognition 56:129–63. simonton, d. k. 1999. Origins of genius: Darwinian perspectives on creativity. New York: Oxford University Press. [mr, mt] s m i t h , a . d . 1986. The ethnic origins of nations. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1991. National identity. Reno: University of Nevada Press. [mr] smith, e. e., and d. l. medin. 1981. Categories and concepts. Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press. smith, e. e., e. j. shoben, and l. j. rips. 1974. Structure and process in semantic memory: A featural model for semantic decisions. Psychological Review 81:214–41. solomon, gregg e. a., susan c. johnson, deborah zaitchik, and susan carey. 1996. Like father, like son: Young children’s understanding of how and why offspring resemble their parents. Child Development 67:151–71. [ra] sperber, dan. 1994. “The modularity of thought and the epidemiology of representations,” in Mapping the mind: Domainspecificity in cognition and culture. Edited by L. A. Hirschfeld and S. Gelman, pp. 39–67. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [ra] ———. 1996. Explaining culture: A naturalistic approach. Oxford: Blackwell. spivak, g. 1987. In other worlds: Essays in cultural politics. New York: Methuen. ———. 1994. “Can the subaltern speak?” in Colonial discourse and postcolonial theory: A reader. Edited by P. Williams and L. Chrisman. New York: Columbia University Press. springer, k. 1996. Young children’s understanding of a biological basis for parent-offspring relations. Child Development 67:2841–56. [sag] stephan, w. g. 1985. “Intergroup relations,” in The handbook of social psychology, 3d edition, vol. 2. Edited by G. Lindzey and E. Aronson, pp. 599–659. New York: Random House. tajfel, h. 1970. Experiments in intergroup discrimination. Scientific American 223: 96–102. tajfel, h., and j. c. turner. 1979. “An integrative theory of intergroup conflict,” in The social psychology of intergroup relations. Edited by S. Worchel and W. G. Austin, pp. 33–47. Monterey, Calif.: Brooks/Cole. taylor, m. g. 1996. The development of children’s beliefs about social and biological aspects of gender differences. Child Development 67:1555–71. [sag] tooby, j., and l. cosmides. 1992. “The psychological foundations of culture,” in The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. Edited by J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby, pp. 19–136. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. turner, j. c., m. a. hogg, p. j. oakes, s. d. reicher, and m. s. wetherell. 1987. Rediscovering the social group: A self-categorization theory. Oxford and New York: Blackwell. van den berghe, p. 1987(1981). The ethnic phenomenon. New York: Praeger. watanabe, s. 1969. Knowing and guessing: A formal and quantitative study. New York: Wiley. wittgenstein, l. 1953. Philosophical investigations. Oxford: Blackwell. yzerbyt, v., o. corneille, and c. estrada. 2001. The interplay of subjective essentialism and entitativity in the formation of stereotypes. Personality and Social Psychology Review. In press. yzerbyt, v. y., s. j. rocher, and g. h. schadron. 1997. “Stereotypes as explanations: A subjective essentialistic view of group perception,” in The psychology of stereotyping and group life. Edited by R. Spears, P. Oakes, N. Ellemers, and N. Haslam, pp. 20–50. London: Basil Blackwell. yzerbyt, v. y., a. rogier, and s. t. fiske. 1998. Group entitativity and social attribution: On translating situational constraints into stereotypes. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 24:1089–1103. zadeh, l. a. 1965. Fuzzy sets. Information and Control 8:338–53.